Could Ash Regan split the vote in the race for SNP leader and end up victorious? Right now, it seems possible
22 February 2023, 19:49
It’s a cliche because it’s true, but a week is a long time in politics.
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Just last Wednesday Nicola Sturgeon dropped her bombshell announcement that she would stand down as SNP leader and therefore as First Minister of Scotland on completion of the election contest to find her successor.
Since then Scottish politics has exploded. The SNP, one of the most publicly unified parties in the UK, is tearing itself apart out in the open, and the whole leadership race has been described as a toxic binfire.
Despite assurances there was an array of talent in her party, there was more of a rush by senior people to rule themselves out rather than in.
Read more: Who could become Scotland's next First Minister? Runners and riders to replace Nicola Sturgeon
Read more: New SNP leader to be revealed March 27 following resignation of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon
Admittedly, no MP would throw their hat in the ring – the FM has to be an MSP - but those with the most experience, John Swinney and Angus Robertson, both backed off sharpish.
As a result the most experienced candidate is Humza Yousaf, the beleaguered health secretary currently under fire for record A&E waiting times, formerly known as the beleaguered justice secretary whose controversial Hate Crime Act united the Catholic Church and the National Secular Society and at one point threatened to criminalise people’s dinner table conversations, and also previously the beleaguered transport minister who was fined £300 in court after being caught driving without insurance.
The private school-educated Glaswegian is regarded as the continuity candidate - though opposition parties in Holyrood appear to be salivating at the thought of First Minister Yousaf given what they see as his track record.
But he is currently the front runner after his Cabinet colleague, finance secretary Kate Forbes, who had been in poll position, decided to blow up her campaign by answering questions truthfully.
Naive at best, it appears Forbes has come unmoored from realpolitik and forgotten what happened to Tim Farron when his faith came under scrutiny.
She has been on maternity leave for several months at her home in the Highlands, but her remarks on a host of social issues have caused a rammy within her party.
Same-sex marriage? She wouldn’t have voted for it; children born outside of marriage? Her faith says down with that sort of thing.
MPs and MSPs who had initially supported her ran away, and Yousaf, whose own Muslim faith has not seen him tied in the same knots, has changed his mind about wanting her in his own Cabinet should he win.
It was as if they didn’t know who she was at all or had assumed that her very open membership of the Free Church of Scotland didn’t really mean she actually believed in all that fire and brimstone stuff. More fool them.
Forbes meanwhile believes it’s better to give straight answers to straight questions and is left hoping the SNP membership is stuffed with the kind of tolerant people it likes to boast about, and who appreciate honesty and integrity as she sees it.
She certainly needs there to be more of them than the type of members who have reported her to SNP management for describing a transgender rapist as “biologically male” and claiming it breaches the code on transphobia.
The most centre-right of the contestants, she will also be hoping that the debate moves on from social issues - although dealing with the Gender Recognition Reform Bill awaits whoever becomes FM - and on to economics and independence.
She is thought to be the strongest on the former, though both she and Yousaf are pitching themselves in the more gradualist camp when it comes to securing the glittering prize which so eluded Nicola Sturgeon.
The dark horse is Ash Regan. Who you ask? She’s definitely not a household name but when has that ever meant anything in internal party elections?
Despite paying for private education for her children, she is seen, like Yousaf, as being more to the left - her credentials being she used to work for the Common Weal organisation and was attracted to politics through the Women for Independence organisation during the 2014 referendum.
Could she split the vote and end up victorious? Right now, it seems possible.
She can certainly pitch herself as an unholy mix of Yousaf and Forbes with a large dollop of independence fundamentalism thrown in.
And her pleas to end the mudslinging will see her pitch herself as the real unity candidate. Like Forbes she came into Holyrood in 2016, she has some government experience as community safety minister and is regarded well in the Scottish legal profession.
She resigned from government over the gender reform Bill rather than vote against her conscience, but she publicly backs same sex marriage and abortion rights.
She takes a different position to Sturgeon on extraction of oil and gas extraction from the North Sea but, unlike the other two, she believes in the de facto referendum idea proposed by the woman she hopes to replace.
In fact, she goes further, saying any and every election should be considered as such, and a 50%+1 result would trigger separation negotiations with the UK government. It is radical and could well be what the SNP members want to hear.
Of course, the fact that there is no obvious successor is being blamed on a lack of succession planning by Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP.
Yet you only need to look at last year’s Conservative Party leadership contest, or indeed the victory of Jeremy Corbyn in Labour, to realise that no political party leader can really plan who will replace them - it’s all in the hands of the members.
There’s some 104,000 of them in the SNP, with around 70 per cent of them over the age of 50. Will they want the continuity Sturgeon candidate in Humza Yousaf, can they overlook Kate Forbes’ views on sex and marriage, or will they be wooed by Ash Regan’s independence plans?
Nominations close on Friday - but the answer to just who will fill Nicola Sturgeon’s vertiginous shoes won’t come until March 27. It’s a month away - an eon in political terms. Anything could happen.
