There is a certain worldly cynicism aroused by the announcement that a politician is stepping down to spend more time with their family. It was for a long time the refuge of MPs who had earned themselves an entry in the News of the World, the Who’s Who of romeos, rogues and reprobates, for their activities with ladies – or young gentlemen – of the night. Less commonly, it was regarded as an admission that someone could not hack it or was frustrated by their slow progress up the greasy pole. After all, no one wants to quit politics.
Contra the cynics, Kate Forbes. Scotland’s deputy first minister will stand down from Holyrood at next May’s elections, having somehow crammed a whole political life into ten tempestuous years. In that time, she has been a backbencher, public finance minister, finance secretary, leadership candidate, backbencher again, and finally deputy first minister and economy secretary. In her letter to first minister John Swinney, she acknowledges that ‘quite rightly this job entails long days far from home’ but ‘I do not wish to seek re-election and miss any more of the precious early years of family life’. Forbes married her husband Alasdair, a widower, in 2021 and became stepmum to his three daughters. The following year the couple had a daughter, who is turning three. (Some men go to war, others jump out of planes, but living with five women is true bravery.)
Forbes was never meant to get where she did. Upon her election to the Scottish parliament in 2016, her religious views were known and they marked her as an apostate in an era of secular progressivism. A member of the Free Presbyterian Church, Forbes’s religion is not an identity category but a living faith. She believes in it all: birth, death, resurrection and salvation. The happy-clappy bits and the fire and brimstone alike. There was little chance of her progressing beyond the outer ministry in the modern, uber-liberal SNP, and she had to settle for a junior ministerial post in the Scottish government’s finance department.
Unfortunately for the party leadership, events overtook. The night before the 2020 budget speech, finance secretary Derek Mackay was forced to quit after a newspaper learned of his text messages to a 16 year old. Forbes, who had been allowed no real input into the budget, was thrust onto the floor of Holyrood to deliver – and be interrogated on – a speech she had only been handed hours before. She did so with such confidence and composure that even the SNP’s most loyal critics commended her. That performance made her promotion to the cabinet finance post inevitable, though some more glumly considered it unavoidable.
By the time Nicola Sturgeon resigned in February 2023, Forbes had established herself as a moderate, pro-business Nationalist who wanted the Scottish government to focus on prosperity rather than gender ideology, an agenda she opposed. Yet the prospect of the party moving to the centre, and especially of it being led by an evangelical Christian, prompted the SNP establishment to throw its weight behind Humza Yousaf, who was well-meaning but plainly not up to running a devolved government. In a straight fight, he would have been no match for Forbes, but instead the leadership contest was shaped by her internal enemies and the media into an inquisition on her religious beliefs.
Journalists well-laden with secular prejudices delighted in making her answer for those verses of Scripture which scandalise modern sensibilities. To her credit as a Christian, but disastrously for a politician, she refused to lie or be evasive about her beliefs. When they asked her views on abortion, she told the truth. When they enquired as to her thinking about gay marriage, she did the same again. When they tried to corner her on trans rights, she was honest and took the punishment that came with it. Compelled to bear witness, she did so with her head held high, fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. It is one of the most personally admirable and politically suicidal decisions I have ever seen.
In the end, she lost, though only narrowly, and was vindicated when her opponent swiftly proved as unequal to the challenges of office as she had warned. He inflicted so much damage with a programme of Continuity Sturgeon progressivism that, just 14 months later, his successor was drafting in Forbes as deputy head of the government to repair relations with the business sector, steer economic policy back to growth, and serve as the symbol of a new pragmatism.
Despite our fundamental disagreements, I rate Forbes as a politician and a public official and said so regularly on Coffee House and elsewhere. This did nothing for her reputation among Nationalists. In fact, I know that it was used against her, and I’m sorry for that. Some regarded with bemusement, others horror, the sight of a gay Catholic Unionist simping for a Wee Free separatist, but the simping was not for Forbes so much as for the fleeting possibility that a leader of her calibre could get her hands on the controls. In a way, I should be relieved that she was sabotaged by the liberal bigots in her own party. If she had been half the first minister I reckon she might have been, she could have broadened the SNP’s electoral coalition to the point at which independence became the consensus view across the electorate. She was a very dangerous woman for a time there, and might be again if she were to return after her children have grown up.
She was a very dangerous woman for a time
The cynics will reassert themselves in the coming days, pronouncing that Forbes has seen the writing on the wall, that the SNP is finished, that she is hinting at her lack of faith in Swinney, that she had risen as high as she would be allowed to in a party thoroughly in the grips of identity politics progressives. Or, and I will tread lightly here, perhaps she truly values motherhood above career, one of the few remaining mortal sins in a non-judgemental age. Her fellow Nationalist Gail Ross did the same in 2021, admitting that five days a week away from her son was just too much. Not coincidentally, she too was a Highlands MSP, where constituencies rival small countries for square mileage. Labour’s Jenny Marra, a considerable talent, walked away after ten years darting up and down the vast North East Scotland region. Family had to come first.
Anglo culture is hardly alone in associating labour with fortitude and moral uprightness, but it is noticeably unforgiving of those who opt out in favour of raising children. Try to balance work and family but say you find it impossible, and you can expect to be chastised for failing at something so many parents do. The resentment is not for admitting you cannot manage but for forcing others to reconsider how well they are managing. I have sat in many a newsroom well into the evening, hearing bedtime stories read over the phone by loving parents who were wanted at home, and wanted to be there, but who were working late to give their children the best start in life. I’m not a parent, and maybe it’s not my place to comment, but I know too many people whose fathers and mothers worked those hours, provided abundantly for their offspring, but now have no relationship with them. Their material needs were more than met but at the expense of other, deeper needs.
No doubt Kate Forbes has made the right decision for her family but I can’t help but wonder how many more families would have benefited from her making it to Bute House. Yes, she’s hopelessly wrong about the constitution, but there’s more to politics than policy. There’s talent and character and leadership. We will have to settle for much less.
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