There are two iron laws of elections that the SNP are in severe danger of becoming all too familiar with. The first is that parties with highly unpopular leaders don’t win elections. The second is that seriously divided parties don’t win elections. It takes quite some talent to lumber yourself with the first problem on the Monday and then the second problem on the Tuesday. The Bible tells us that the Lord rested after six days, but the way things are going we’d better all hope the SNP stop doing things after only two.
The constructive dismissal of Kate Forbes after she’s just won 48% of the vote is the sort of thing you can only get away with if you’re in an exceptionally strong position as a leader – for example if you’re immensely popular with the public, and if therefore it doesn’t matter if people on your own side start squealing because you know the voters will always back you. Humza is not in that sort of enviable position – he’s on unusually weak ground with both his own party and the public, and in fact he needed Kate Forbes far more than she needed him, because co-opting her as a deputy or close ally would have offset some of his own unpopularity. She was almost inspiringly gracious in defeat yesterday – people both inside and outside the SNP will have looked at the way she conducted herself, and thought “gosh, what a genuinely lovely and kind person she is”. Throwing that back in her face within 24 hours is going to have consequences, the most immediate of which is that people can now see with absolute clarity what the Humza campaign has been about from the start – not about the best interests of the SNP or of the independence cause, but about safeguarding the power and privileges of a faction within the SNP, and at absolutely any price.
It’s the rough equivalent of Tony Blair doing on Day 1 what he didn’t dare to do even after ten years – sacking Gordon Brown as Chancellor. It will create fault-lines, and fault-lines create earthquakes. Exactly how it will play out is impossible to tell, but there is one consolation – the more Humza overplays his hand, the quicker the crisis will come and the quicker he may be deposed, thus getting the SNP out of the hole they’ve just dug for themselves. So perhaps this kind of hubris from him should be positively encouraged.
Kate Forbes gets 48% of the vote and Shona Robison becomes Deputy First Minister. Is this a kind of bunker mentality? A narrow victory means “we are the masters still”? That’s fine in a one-party state, but in this country the public eventually get their say.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 28, 2023
