The leadership battle is a bizarre beauty pageant, aimed at a very narrow group of SNP members who hold the keys to Bute House, writes David Knight.
As SNP foot soldiers prepared for a momentous vote to find a new leader, they suddenly reminded me of Tories from a distance.
They tread precariously in the footsteps of their arch enemies: the Tories, “hated” so much by Nicola Sturgeon, whose career collapsed, just like their leaders.
Conservative members were also faced with choosing not only a party leader, but a new prime minister for the country.
So, a minority of the population – 100,000 or so paid-up SNP party members – foists a new first minister on the rest of us. Lumbered with someone for whom we didn’t vote.
The healthiest option would be to test the new leader’s popularity straight away in a parliamentary election. The SNP hierarchy don’t seem so keen now the tables are turned.
Sturgeon and Co clamoured for an election to authenticate Conservative leadership campaigns, after Johnson and Truss were deposed, which they trashed as undemocratic. So, what’s the difference? There isn’t one.
The SNP members-only vote launched on March 13 is make or break for the party’s immediate future. Sturgeon was the anointed one for years, but pressed the self-destruct button while lacking an obvious successor.
It means they might have to choose another leader in a few months – just like the Tories after tossing Truss aside for Sunak. A scenario too far-fetched to consider? Just think about it.
From day one, a new SNP leader has to navigate through stormy waters, with political opponents trying to torpedo them, and carry the disaffected on their own side.
Embarrassing internal party splits and rivalries were only fully exposed to us during Sturgeon’s political death throes, along with serious doubts about whether any of the three leadership candidates were up to it.
So, the potential winners have plenty to fear if the SNP slides further backwards – from within their own ranks. As Wellington said about his own troops before the Battle of Waterloo: “I don’t know what effect they’ll have on the enemy, but they frighten me.”
That’s why Sturgeon was forced to keep throwing raw meat to the “referendum now” hardcore members, to make them think independence was tantalisingly close. Anything less than that would have resembled a chief ordering a bunch of cannibals to switch to varied, plant-based diets.
I am not really suggesting the SNP’s hardcore are cannibals, by the way, in case anyone starts complaining.
Whoever wins will soon have to change their tune
The leadership rivals have probably frightened off mainstream moderates already, even before any of them take office. Sturgeon confessed to being a polarising figure, but these are poleaxing the potential to win over wider support.
However, the leadership battle is a bizarre beauty pageant, aimed at a very narrow group of SNP members who hold the keys to Bute House. “Tell ’em what they want to hear, and then tell ’em again,” is time and tested advice for preaching to the converted, as all three leadership hopefuls are doing fervently.
But, whoever wins will soon have to change their tune to appeal to the moderate majority, which includes a lot of existing SNP voters.
The leader will pick up a broken baton dropped by Sturgeon, with a mountain of unresolved crises from day one
The leader will pick up a broken baton dropped by Sturgeon, with a mountain of unresolved crises from day one.
Sturgeon surged forward on the momentum created by Alex Salmond. She couldn’t help boasting, as she resigned, about her “emphatic” election wins and how close she had taken the party to another stab at independence.
Did she forget to mention that she was only propped up in power thanks to the Greens? And that independence support was still languishing where it had been more than a decade ago?
Amazingly, even though Sturgeon helped to create a toxic atmosphere in Scotland, some apologists were seeking to almost deify her. But “Saint Nicola” was politically bankrupt; even a quick glance at her profit and loss account showed red figures easily obliterated the black.
Same old, same old?
Humza Yousaf is the continuity candidate favoured by SNP top brass, which means Sturgeon in disguise. Naively, I kind of assumed the new leader would emphatically ditch a decade of failure and reinvent the party.
Therefore, not surprisingly, Yousaf also seems to be the favoured winner for the other parties who back the union. Highlander Kate Forbes is perhaps the one they really fear, because she is refreshing and painfully honest.
Holding private religious views should not bar anyone from public office, as long as they don’t undermine the role. Some hysterically fear her religious views, but Forbes is hardly the Spanish Inquisition incarnate.
She sells herself as a unifying influence on a wider audience, despite the frenetic vaudeville show for hardcore members; a role Sturgeon performed so abysmally. But she also has an attraction which exudes competence and straight answers: qualities which have been missing for more than a decade.
Despite that, I fear a “same old, same old” SNP might be on the way; that means Groundhog Day.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
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