The whole SNP project is now in danger

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021. 

Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over the last two years. In his resignation statement, Foote said he had been ‘acting in good faith’ in issuing ‘agreed party responses’ to journalists on behalf of HQ, but it had ‘subsequently become apparent that there are serious issues with those responses’. In drawing an ethical line where he has, Foote may be the only figure to come out of this episode with his reputation intact.

Foote’s departure was preceded by the announcement that Liz Lloyd would be leaving government. Lloyd is Sturgeon’s long-time right-hand woman and previously served as the First Minister’s chief of staff. However, there was disquiet when it was reported earlier this week that, despite being a Scottish government special adviser, she was advising the leadership campaign of Humza Yousaf, widely seen as Sturgeon’s favoured replacement. Lloyd said yesterday that it had ‘always been my intention’ to exit the Scottish government when Sturgeon does. 

‘It takes decades to build a political party but days to destroy one,’ Alex Salmond tweeted yesterday. The fall of Sturgeon, and perhaps with her the New SNP that she fashioned, has indeed been precipitous. We can trace it back to a number of events. There was the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that Holyrood could not legislate for a referendum without Westminster’s permission. 

There was pushing the unpopular and hardline Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill through the Scottish parliament, with the concerns of women’s rights campaigners and SNP MSPs brushed aside. Then, when the Bill was blocked by Westminster for fear it could change how UK law operates, there was fresh anger: all that political capital expended for nothing. There was ongoing disquiet about the party’s financial arrangements, including a police investigation into how £667,000 of supporters’ donations, raised for a ring-fenced independence fighting fund, was ultimately spent. 

Then there was the sheer emptiness of the Sturgeon policy cupboard. In eight years as First Minister, she pledged but failed to close the educational attainment gap, introduced but failed to meet ‘legally binding’ NHS targets, oversaw the worst drugs death figures in Europe, and commissioned two ferries now five years overdue and three times over budget. The impression was growing inside her party that she had allowed her coalition with the Scottish Greens to compromise the SNP’s governing agenda, with critics citing the GRR Bill, a chaos-ridden deposit return scheme and the breaking of a pledge to dual the A9, a fatal car crash hotspot that runs through several SNP-held constituencies. 

Since announcing her resignation, Sturgeon has had to watch as contenders to replace her trash her legacy. Yousaf now stands as the final, desperate hope of the regime. If they can drag him across the finish line in this race, he can be expected to continue Sturgeon’s approach of kicking independence into the long grass while reorienting the party around elite priorities, closed-door policy-making, and the whole panoply of progressive identity politics. This is the New SNP, and while it has coincided with big electoral wins for the party, it hasn’t brought independence an inch closer and has clearly cost it a significant number of members. 

The New SNP project is now in danger. If Yousaf’s main rival Kate Forbes wins the leadership contest, Sturgeon will be politely but firmly retired and the party refocused on voters’ priorities, competent governance, and building a credible case for independence. If Forbes wins, there will be a lot more desk-clearing to come.