Wings Over Scotland

The beam on Kate Forbes’ face was quite something.

She’d clearly been exhausted by the contest some time ago, and must have been dreading winning and having to continue fighting the assault from within her own party. Her evident delight and relief at her own failure was a revealing moment.

The great unknown in this election was just who the SNP membership was. No poll could tell us, and with over 50,000 people having quit the party in the last three years, nobody knew who was left. But we know now: idiots.

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Today is the last day of Nicola Sturgeon’s record-breaking reign as First Minister of Scotland. In a few hours we’ll know who is to succeed her in the role. She was only the second SNP occupant of Bute House, and the legacy she bequeaths compared to the one she inherited from Alex Salmond is a matter of measureable record.

So let’s see the final scores on the doors.

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There can surely be no credible disputing that the SNP leadership election – and therefore that of Scotland’s next First Minister – is, to put it very mildly, under a cloud.

The list of let’s call them “irregularities” is almost endless. The artificial truncation of the contest, against the SNP constitution; the packing of the hustings with Humza Yousaf supporters; candidates being denied any knowledge about the size of the membership until voting was under way, and then the party’s press chief and CEO both resigning over lying about it; the apparent existence of 6000 more ballot papers than the party has members; one of the Scottish Government’s most senior officers being improperly seconded to the Yousaf campaign (and then also resigning as a result); numerous documented examples of non-members being given votes while fully-paid-up members weren’t; we could, frankly, go on and on.

As things stand, whoever wins will be forever tainted by the process – easy meat for the Unionist opposition in the Holyrood chamber and the media and a potential legal challenge could cause untold further damage to the party.

With six days still left for voting, the case for a reballot – an administratively fairly trivial task in an election being conducted almost entirely online – is now unanswerable, and needn’t even involve a delay.

Only one person stands in the way.

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The SNP having a fondness for lying about their membership wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to the Scottish press if they paid a little more attention to this website. Because we were pointing it out two and a half years ago.

It was in October 2020 that we told you how the SNP’s 2019 accounts revealed the party’s true membership figures weren’t the claimed 126,000 but more like 87,000.

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The mainstream Scottish political media might not have many professional standards, but there’s one it’s still pretty diligent about upholding.

And that’s that if a political party’s press office starts really taking liberties and making them look like fools, all bets (and gloves) are off.

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…of the SNP has been in the post for quite some time.

Because no party can prosper for long when it’s stuffed full of complete dum-dums.

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How it started, just one month ago:

And how it’s going:

But it’s quite a lot worse than it looks.

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Hats off to the SNP. Every time we think that the party’s leadership election can’t get any more absurdly farcical, they pull something extra-mad out of the bag.

After this happened yesterday, it suddenly become “known” across the Scottish media that the SNP NEC was going to hold an extraordinary meeting in order to authorise the release of the membership figures after all three candidates demanded them.

Some of the country’s most senior hacks, including BBC Scotland’s Political Editor and the editor of the Daily Record, sombrely informed their readers of the development.

Only trouble was, nobody had told the SNP NEC.

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Well, this has set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Because the SNP leadership election is now a full-blown four-alarm skip fire.

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Two obvious things arise from this clip from last night’s BBC leadership debate.

Don’t worry, this won’t take long.

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Tonight’s debate on Sky News between the three SNP leadership candidates was yet another inconclusive low-scoring draw, with each contender taking a few hits (almost all from host Beth Rigby) and also landing the odd blow on each other.

The most notable of the latter was probably when Ash Regan gave Humza Yousaf a rather uncomfortable time over his claiming credit for the Queensferry Crossing when he was Transport Secretary.

As well as frantically trying to deflect by pretending Regan had attacked the SNP’s record on the project in general, Yousaf insisted that he’d played a major role in the bridge’s delivery. So let’s just check the timeline.

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The Unionist media in Scotland (ie all of the media in Scotland) usually keeps up a pretty united front when it comes to the subjects of independence or the SNP. So it’s been fascinating in these last couple of weeks to see a genuine schism develop between them on the subject of the party’s leadership election.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we do not include Holyrood Magazine, whose splendid front cover image that is, in “the Unionist media”.)

Right back at the start of the contest we highlighted The Times’ full-on love-in for Kate Forbes, but most of the Scottish press has now made their preferences clear. And you’ll never guess who they really, really DON’T want to be the next First Minister.

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