The contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon really shouldn’t be a contest at all. The obvious successor is Kate Forbes, the Scottish finance secretary. She is young at 32 but she was even younger three years ago when she stepped in to deliver the Scottish budget just 12 hours after finance minister Derek Mackay was forced by scandal to resign. Her plaudit-winning performance showed her to be a woman of ability and nerve.
If you want to keep evangelical zeal out of politics, Kate Forbes is the least of your worries
These are not her only qualities. Forbes is Cambridge-educated and a disciplined media performer. She is a true believer in the cause of independence but a moderate in tone and temperament. She doesn’t think Tories and Unionists are wicked or less patriotic and not only tolerates but respects different points of view. She represents a Highland constituency in a political landscape dominated by the Glasgow-Edinburgh mafia. She is even a fluent speaker of Scots Gaelic.
There’s a problem, though: Forbes is a Christian. Not one of those social gospel, what-pronouns-would-Jesus-have-used trendy Christians, either. No, she believes in sin and salvation, death and resurrection, Scripture and witness, ‘the almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness of God’.
She would not be the first member of the Free Church of Scotland to lead the SNP. Gordon Wilson, who chaired the party from 1979 to 1990, was not only a devout Christian but a proud, professing one who co-founded the Solas Centre for Public Christianity. That, however, was a different time, when the SNP was all about ‘the restoration of Scottish national sovereignty’ and ‘the furtherance of all Scottish interests’. It was also an era where freedom of speech and conscience still enjoyed the favour of political and cultural elites. Forbes must navigate an SNP in which progressive identity politics competes with the constitution for the attention of parliamentarians and grassroots activists. She must do so at a time when religious faith — and let’s not be coy about this: Christianity — is regarded at best with suspicion but more often as bigotry licensed by superstition.
No one who has ever listened to Forbes, let alone been in her company, could rationally think her a bigot. She is pleasant, respectful and doesn’t view the public with horror and distaste, as is now the norm in her profession. She once told me her favourite opinion polling was going to her hairdresser in Inverness, where her fellow customers, plain-speaking Highlanders, were only too forthcoming with their views. She expresses no desire to foist her faith on others and asks only to be free to live that faith as a working politician. Forbes has been finance secretary for three years now and hasn’t tried to slip Leviticus into any of her budgets so far.
What does her faith entail? Forbes has offered a personal credo of sorts:
‘To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ. I believe that He died for me, He saved me and that my calling is to serve and to love Him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength. So that for me is essential to my being. Politics will pass. I am a person before I was a politician and that person will continue to believe that I am made in the image of God.’
Now, perhaps you reckon all religion is bunk and talk of serving the Almighty and being fashioned in the image of the Divine a bit happy-clappy. This is Scotland, not Alabama. We don’t want lawmakers posing for photo-ops outside megachurches, waving a bible in one hand and accepting donations with the other.
But read over Forbes’ words once more. That is not the statement of a fanatic or a moralistic poseur. It is a profession of honest faith, shared fully in the knowledge that doing so would bring ridicule and hurt her political ambitions. It is a statement of humility, in which the person is small but her moral duties great.
If you’re still not convinced, ponder that line, ‘Politics will pass’. Who would you rather be governed by, a Jesus enthusiast for whom politics is a mere sideshow in life, or a secular progressive for whom politics is the centre of their life — and placing it at the centre of yours their mission? If you want to keep evangelical zeal out of politics, Kate Forbes is the least of your worries.
Within the SNP there is sharp resistance to Forbes. She is not on board with the transgender self-identification ideology, though she was on maternity leave when the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was being pushed through Holyrood. This has led to her being pilloried and briefed against by some in the SNP, with the insinuation that her coming to prominence would somehow imperil the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Forbes also ruffled feathers in 2018 when she was reported to have said a prayer — the horror! — that mentioned the dignity of ‘the unborn or the terminally ill’.
Unfortunately for Forbes, these are current controversies within the SNP and Scottish politics. Sturgeon’s GRR Bill was blocked by Westminster and whoever is First Minister will have to decide whether to fight that decision in court. The same person will also determine how ministers respond to the forthcoming review into the Scottish Prison Service’s transgender inmate policy, which saw a rapist originally being assigned to a women’s prison before being hastily transferred amid public outcry.
The issue of abortion is also at the fore given efforts by SNP and Green MSPs to outlaw prayer vigils outside abortion clinics, a policy known as ‘buffer zones’. Forbes’ internal opponents would paint her as someone likely to stir up intra-party tensions at the very point when the SNP least needs it. There would also be questions raised about the future of the coalition agreement between Nicola Sturgeon and Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, the ultra-progressive co-leaders of the Scottish Greens for whom gender identity ideology is a higher priority than the environment.
What is still unknown is whether Forbes will seek the leadership. Sturgeon is a workaholic. In the wake of the EU referendum result, I was told she was working 18-hour days at some points. But anyone would struggle to maintain a healthy-work life balance running such a vast government apparatus while also heading up Scotland’s biggest political party. It can be a thankless task at times and Forbes would have to do it while being assailed for her faith and having every aspect of her religious life put under the scrutiny of an aggressively secular media.
Kate Forbes might be just what the SNP needs. The question is whether First Minister is a job she wants.
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