Kate Forbes has clearly decided not to run, which is hopefully a decision made from a position of strength due to a deal with John Swinney.  The SNP have missed a golden opportunity to get back on track, but I'm not as despondent as I was a year ago when Humza Yousaf narrowly won.  That outcome was an unmitigated disaster because it lumbered the independence movement with three problems simultaneously - a) it put independence on the backburner for the foreseeable future, b) it installed an unsuitable leader who the public actively disliked and thought wasn't up to the job, and c) it ..read more

John Swinney has finally declared, and as I said yesterday, he was always going to have to address the suspicion that he'd be an interim leader.  He's now said that he would lead the SNP through both the general election and Holyrood election, although that still leaves open the question of how far beyond the Holyrood election he would go. We now wait to see if Kate Forbes will take him on or has done a deal with him.  I hope she takes him on, but if she's done a deal I hope she's settled for nothing less than a dual role as Deputy First Minister and a senior Cabinet brief, most lik ..read more

We still don't know whether there will be a contested SNP leadership election between Johm Swinney and Kate Forbes.  If there is, I agree with the conventional wisdom that Swinney would start as favourite (he's literally the only potential candidate who would start as favourite against Forbes), but I disagree with those assuming the outcome would be a foregone conclusion.  Those people are laying a lot of emphasis on the sentimental attachment that the SNP rank-and-file have for Swinney, and I don't think there's much doubt that if SNP conference delegates or attendees of branch meet ..read more

Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson, aka "Jurassic Farq", has a really nasty piece in The Times which is ultimately a bigoted rant about why a committed member of a particular religious denomination he personally dislikes should never be allowed to hold high office, but which tarts itself up in progressive-sounding language about how our leaders must reflect the diversity of modern Scotland.  On that note, incidentally, wouldn't it be rather a good idea to at last have a First Minister who is a fluent Gaelic speaker?  Given the dire predictions that Gaelic could cease to be a fully-fun ..read more

Ipsos are out of the blocks at lightning speed with a poll conducted yesterday and today on the SNP leadership race.  As expected, Kate Forbes is once again the voters' clear choice as First Minister. Which SNP politician would make the best First Minister? (Ipsos, 29th-30th April 2024) Kate Forbes 26% John Swinney 20% Stephen Flynn 7% Angus Robertson 4% Shona Robison 2% Mairi McAllan 2% Humza Yousaf 2% Jenny Gilruth 1% Swinney does have the consolation of leading among SNP voters, but remember once you start digging into subsamples like that, the chances of inaccuracy become greater bec ..read more

Amidst all of yesterday's mayhem, it shouldn't be overlooked that YouGov published a full-scale Scottish poll, which was conducted before Yousaf resigned but only just before, so it takes into account the impact of the pre-resignation crisis but not the impact of the resignation itself.  Amazingly, it shows the SNP slightly on the up.  That's probably just a reversion to the mean after a poor previous poll, but nevertheless even just holding steady should be regarded as a major relief. Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election: Labour 34% (+1) SNP 33% (+2) Conserv ..read more

Professor John Curtice has summed it up -  "Swinney’s expertise, I think, is being able to say nothing for three minutes. Definitely who you want as your deputy but it’s not the person to front an election campaign." The problem being that the SNP face one of the most important election campaigns in their history within a few months at most, and the continuity faction are hellbent on installing the ill-suited Swinney to front it.  For the second time in just over a year, we're watching them make a destructive mistake in real time.  On some sort of level, they probably even know ..read more

The title of this post contains the exact words John Swinney himself used a few years ago when someone suggested he might be a future leader.  Because he was of course leader between 2000 and 2004, and it really didn't work.  The SNP had convinced themselves that the public would warm to Swinney as an 'elder brother' figure who was much less divisive and Marmite than his predecessor Alex Salmond, but the public had other ideas.  I can remember multiple appearances by John Curtice on Newsnight Scotland in which he urged the SNP to face up to the fact that they had a major leader ..read more

It's no secret that I've wanted Humza Yousaf to resign from literally the day he was elected.  I was constantly told that there was no chance of that happening before the general election, and my reply was always that it quite simply needed to happen before the general election, otherwise the SNP were going to get hammered.  So in a sense his departure today might look like a dream outcome, but it's only half of the necessary equation - if the SNP replace him with someone even worse, such as Jenny Gilruth or Neil Gray, today will be a further setback not a step forward.  And tha ..read more

The Times website has an "exclusive" claiming that Alba are making a 'Scotland United' electoral pact the price of any support for Humza Yousaf in the no confidence vote.  Some people are interpreting that as a demand that is intentionally so unpalatable for the SNP that it's actually meant to be rejected, in other words that Alba have already made up their minds to vote against Yousaf and are just working their way through the pre-vote choreography.  But this may be one of those occasions where it's worth looking beyond the headline and reading the details of the article, because wh ..read more