Kate Forbes has taken an early lead in the race to replace Nicola Sturgeon. The Finance Secretary, who’s currently on maternity leave, has emerged in first place in a poll of Scottish voters.
The poll for the Scotsman asked 1,004 people who they’d like to see leading the SNP and settling into Bute House. Forbes leads among SNP voters with 18 per cent. Among all voters she’s also the most popular with 14 per cent of the vote.
Angus Robertson – who remains the bookies' favourite – was second in the poll with 14 per cent of SNP voters and 9 per cent of the public backing him. John Swinney, the deputy first minister and Sturgeon’s right-hand man, came in third but has already ruled himself out.
It was bad news for Health Secretary Humza Yousaf though. He came last among the front-runners with just 7 per cent of SNP voters wanting him to take over. All candidates have work to do, however. Over a third of SNP voters and half of Scots picked ‘don’t know’ when answering the poll.
This is the second poll that has given Forbes the lead. An Ipsos poll for the Times taken on Thursday found just under a third of Scots thought she would do a good job leading the country. Swinney scored the same but has ruled himself out of the contest. Angus Robertson had 24 per cent saying he’d do well and Yousaf received just a fifth of the vote. Keith Brown, the deputy leader, beat ‘Stuart Lewis’, a fictional candidate, by just seven points.
Forbes has yet to formally throw her hat in the ring. She’s seen as the only candidate who can ‘reset’ the damage caused to the party by Sturgeon (the SNP have slumped to their lowest poll lead in years) because Forbes was hostile to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. But party sources sympathetic to Forbes fear the election timetable (just over five weeks) appeared to have been ‘designed to block Kate’. The same source was reported in the Times as saying: ‘the upper echelons of the cabinet were certainly aware of Kate’s notional timescale, that April was the target, after John Swinney’s budget has been wrapped up.’
Party watchers and MPs alike share the view that if she does enter the race, the polls will be borne out and Forbes will win. But perhaps the biggest question is whether she’ll run at all. Forbes may think the timescale stacks the odds against her or that her religious convictions will cause her trouble. Taking over from Nicola Sturgeon has already been compared to David Moyes taking over from Alex Ferguson after his 27 years at the helm of Manchester United. As the Sun puts it: it’ll be like ‘pushing water uphill with a fork.’
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