Defeated rivals: inside the tent or out?
Humza Yousaf won the leadership of the SNP and effectively left his close rival Kate Forbes out of his top team: is that a politically astute decision?
Until yesterday, there had only been three leaders of the Scottish National party in nearly 35 years: Alex Salmond, once a Teflon giant of Caledonian politics and now a famous purveyor of “sleepy cuddles”, was elected in the autumn of 1990 and stayed for 10 years, at the end serving as the Scottish Parliament’s first leader of the opposition. In 2000, he stood aside after a number of high-profile rows with colleagues, and was replaced by his protégé, the dust-dry and ineffective John Swinney. But poor results at the Scottish Parliament elections in 2003 and the European Parliament elections the following year fuelled discontent and Swinney resigned in the summer of 2004. Salmond had not found a post-leadership niche and stood for his old job, winning three-quarters of the vote in a landslide. He would stay for another 10 years.
In May 2007, Salmond led the SNP to become the largest party in the Scottish Parliament, and, securing the support of the Scottish Greens in return for concessions on climate policy, formed a minority government, becoming the first nationalist first minister. The party won an overall majority in 2011—a result the electoral system of the Scottish Parliament was supposed to make impossible—and Salmond declared there would be a referendum on independence in 2014. When the vote was won by the No campaign by 55 per cent to 45 per cent, Salmond announced his resignation, and was succeeded without a contest by his depute leader, Nicola Sturgeon. This year, after more than eight years in post, Sturgeon too called time on her leadership. Yesterday, the SNP chose 37-year-old Humza Yousaf, health secretary in Sturgeon’s cabinet, to replace her.
The leadership contest has been a polarising one. Swinney, having been leader before from 2000 to 2004 and then Sturgeon’s deputy first minister since 2014, ruled himself out early on and announced he would leave the government; he is only 58 but has been in the front rank for many years, and his leadership was hardly a stellar success. It was sensible to stop a bandwagon before it was exposed that the bandwagon didn’t exist. Angus Robertson, the constitution and external affairs secretary, also declined to run. He is an experienced figure, having led the SNP in the House of Commons for 10 years from 2007 to 2017, and is an unusually cosmopolitan figure for his party, half-German and having spent some years as a BBC World Service correspondent in Central Europe.
Another name improbably but briefly touted was that of Joanna Cherry, the brilliant, unpredictable and abrasive KC who sits in the Commons for Edinburgh South West. She has been viewed as an ally of Alex Salmond, whom she knows well, and her gender critical stance has led her to clash with many of her own party. She was never realistic leadership material, and was sacked from the SNP front bench in 2021, but she is a formidable debater with a clear and sharp mind and is one of the party’s few figures of real substance in the Commons, Stewart Hosie being the other obvious one.
In the end, the candidates in the contest were Yousaf; Kate Forbes, the young finance secretary; and Ash Regan, who resigned from her junior post as minister for community safety last autumn because of her opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. It rapidly became a polarised contest. While Regan was never regarded as a serious contender, Forbes struck controversy because of her membership of the Free Church of Scotland (the “Wee Frees”), a socially conservative and evangelical presbyterian body which broke with the Church of Scotland in the Great Disruption of 1843.
The Free Church is the second-biggest Presbyterian denomination in Scotland, Forbes’s parents were missionaries and she has never hidden her adherence, nor is it any secret that the church opposes sex before marriage, same-sex unions and abortion (which it has compared in moral terms to slavery) in most circumstances. Somehow, though, Forbes’s religious beliefs suddenly became a point of interest as she proposed herself as a potential first minister. She honestly but perhaps unwisely said that she would have voted against same-sex marriages if she had been an MSP when they were introduced, and that she would have voted against the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill had she not been on maternity leave; but she also stressed that, if elected first minister, she would not seek to reverse those measures or change the legal status of abortion.
Yousaf was clearly the more socially progressive candidate, very much a continuation of Sturgeon’s vision of the SNP as a left-wing party. He had publicly supported same-sex marriage and gender recognition reform, though it transpired that he had missed the Stage 3 vote on the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014 due to a previous engagement. He also supports writing LGBT rights into the constitution of an independent Scotland and would like the monarchy to be replaced by a republican system.
When the result of the leadership election was announced on 27 March, Yousaf won by a small margin. Regan, as expected, trailed badly, with only 11 per cent in the first round (though for a previously unknown former junior minister, she may have boosted her political stock somewhat). Forbes was second with 41 per cent of the vote, while Yousaf led with 48 per cent. When Regan’s second preferences were redistributed, however, they went predominantly to Forbes, who closed on Yousaf substantially, but the latter was elected with 52 per cent of the vote against Forbes’s 48 per cent (eagle-eyed readers may find the 52/48 split familiar from previous electoral events).
Yousaf therefore won a narrow victory, and the furore over Forbes’s views on social issues seems not to have damaged her significantly. She was, after all, only elected to Holyrood in 2016 and drafted in as finance secretary in 2020 when Derek Mackay resigned in disgrace over an unwise intimate relationship with a 16-year-old schoolboy. She had been his junior as public finance and digital economy minister since 2018. Forbes is not yet 33 and, to put it into context, was five months old when Alex Salmond first took the helm of the SNP, so she would have been an extraordinarily young first minister and has no reason to regard this as her last tilt at Bute House, or at least at the leadership of her party.
Yousaf was nominated as first minister by the Scottish Parliament yesterday and will be appointed by the King and sworn in at the Court of Session today at Parliament House, the Lord President of the court, Scotland’s most senior judge, administering the Official Oath. The nomination was agreed on party lines: Yousaf received 71 votes (all the SNP MSPs and the Scottish Greens, who are in coalition with them); Douglas Ross, the Conservative and Unionist leader, received 31 votes; Labour leader Anas Sarwar won 22; and Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Liberal Democrat nominee, had four supporters.
One of the first questions to occupy the commentariat was the fate of Kate Forbes. For all the controversy, she seems to have emerged from the leadership contest with her stature enhanced; her 48 per cent support was a very strong showing for one so young and about whom relatively little was known before her candidacy, and it is clear that she has a constituency within the SNP, attracting more of Ash Regan’s second preferences than did Yousaf. More generally, anyone who wins a leadership election must quickly judge what to do with his or her defeated rivals: to use Lyndon Johnson’s typically vivid phrase about J. Edgar Hoover, is it better to have them inside your tent pissing out, or outside your tent pissing in? The dangers of each option must be carefully weighed up; and if inclusion is the order of the day, how senior a position within the tent should the defeated rival be given?
A major part of the assessment depends on the character and position of the rivals. Are they coming to the end of their careers, and therefore probably lacking further ambitions towards the leadership, or are they in their pomp, still a rival if the new leader should stumble or a focus of any dissent and plotting, a potential replacement or successor? Are they essentially loyal and honourable, accepting of defeat and willing to knuckle down for the greater good, or are they consumed by ambition, ruthless and self-interested, likely to view every action through the lens of their own advantage? And how well did they perform in the leadership election? Did they run the winner close, obviously winning the support of a substantial section of the party, or did they accumulate a more modest tally, allowing them to be pushed aside without too much difficulty, or else manipulated to gain the support of their backers without exposing the leader to danger?
It will also be a decision heavily influenced by personal feeling and emotion on the part of the leader. Sturgeon was elected unopposed in 2014, no other candidate even able to attract enough support to clamber on to the ballot, so she was left with no wounded colleagues to appease or attempt to despatch. She had served as deputy first minister under Salmond for seven years, responsible initially for health and wellbeing and then for infrastructure and capital investment, and was quite obviously the party’s dauphine. Before that, when Salmond had staged his comeback in 2004, he had won a crushing victory and winning 76 per cent of the votes. He beat Roseanna Cunningham, who won 15 per cent, and Mike Russell, who came in last with a little under 10 per cent; Cunningham had been the front runner before Salmond’s decision to return, and was deputy leader, but after her defeat moved to the backbenches and became convener of the Health Committee; Russell, a former shadow education and culture minister and SNP chief executive, had lost his seat on the South of Scotland list and was absent from the Parliament (though he regained the place in 2007 and was made a junior environment minister).
The 2000 leadership election had presented a similar sight. John Swinney won handily with 67 per cent of the vote, while his only rival, Alex Neil, a relative veteran whose journey had begun in the Scottish Labour Party, was not included in Swinney’s frontbench team but became convener of the Scottish Parliament enterprise and lifelong learning committee. There was, therefore, little guidance in the SNP’s past for Yousaf.
More broadly, some leaders have kept their rivals close and relied heavily on them. Margaret Thatcher, winning the Conservative leadership in 1975, made the runner-up William Whitelaw her deputy, in which role he served loyally and crucially until 1988, as home secretary and then leader of the House of Lords. He was a critical figure in Thatcher’s leadership, older and more experienced than she, and from a more traditional, aristocratic background, reassuring Conservative MPs who were still uneasy at the election of a woman to lead the party. He was an invaluable power-broker behind the scenes and a reliable ally in cabinet; Thatcher would be moved to remark that “every prime minister needs a Willie” (though it is uncertain whether the joke was intentional; I doubt it). This was an especially happy combination of circumstances. Thatcher and Whitelaw complemented each other almost perfectly, and Whitelaw was an honourable man of impeccable loyalty and public service, who was never a threat to her position.
Harold Wilson had a less happy experience. When Hugh Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, Wilson beat George Brown and James Callaghan to take the Labour leadership, but not by a country mile: in the second ballot of MPs, he won the backing of 144 while Brown was supported by 103 (Callaghan had been eliminated after the first round). The new leader did not have a free hand. Brown remained deputy leader (to which position he had been elected in 1960), therefore entitled to a seat in the shadow cabinet, and had to be included in the party’s senior counsels. But he was extremely volatile, fiercely intelligent after having left school at 15, ideologically popular with the party’s right, but capable of extraordinary rudeness and wild mood swings. Most significantly, he was a heavy drinker, perhaps already an alcoholic, and the situation worsened. When Labour came to power in 1964, Wilson made Brown head of the new Department of Economic Affairs, partly to try to revitalise Whitehall’s policy-making apparatus but mostly to allow him to balance Brown with Callaghan at the Treasury and (initially) the witty and intellectual Patrick Gordon Walker as foreign secretary.
Brown would not be an easy colleague. He was touchy and quick to anger, perhaps sensing that the DEA was a position created to isolate rather than empower him, and made little headway beyond the publication of his trumpeted National Plan; in a crisis over the devaluation of sterling, which he supported, in July 1966, he submitted his resignation when the cabinet decided against the idea, but Wilson persuaded him to remain. He became foreign secretary, the job he had always craved, a few months after the 1966 general election but was clearly unsuited for the role of the UK’s chief diplomat. After his humiliation over devaluation, Brown became depressed and his drinking worsened, awkward and embarrassing incidents becoming more frequent. When devaluation returned to the agenda in 1968, Wilson assembled a special meeting of the Privy Council to declare an emergency bank holiday, but the foreign secretary could not be found. His staff reported that he was “only ‘so-so’ when last seen”, but he reappeared in the early hours of the next morning, furious at being excluded as well as obviously very drunk, and engaged in a shouting match with the prime minister. It was the end, and later that day he resigned. It removed a serious liability.
There is always the nuclear option. John Major’s leadership had been under severe pressure for months when, in the summer of 1995, he shocked Westminster by resigning as party leader to engineer an election, challenging his opponents to “put up or shut up”. Only the eccentric and hard-to-like right-winger John Redwood, who had been Welsh secretary, put himself forward, and Major won the ensuing contest, but Redwood, never a plausible leader, nonetheless won 89 votes, nearly a quarter of the parliamentary party. Major accrued 218 votes, enough to win outright, but the support for Redwood was a serious blow, and it later emerged that Major had privately resolved to resign if he did not reach 215 votes, so it had been a near-run thing.
Despite the size of the challenge, Major did not include Redwood in his reconstructed government; indeed, while Redwood represented the Eurosceptic right wing, it was the opposite side of the party which Major rewarded. Michael Heseltine became deputy prime minister and Malcolm Rifkind was promoted to foreign secretary, reinforcing Kenneth Clarke as chancellor of the Exchequer, while Stephen Dorrell took over as health secretary, Ian Lang became president of the Board of Trade and Alastair Goodlad was made chief whip. Perhaps Major felt he had little to lose, as there had to be an election in less than two years, and only the most desperate or purblind Eurosceptic thought there would be any further possibility of replacing Major.
We know the first part of the story for Yousaf. Yesterday, he offered Forbes the job of rural affairs secretary, a significant demotion from her previous position of finance secretary. To no-one’s surprise, she refused and will return to the backbenches, but she dutifully offered Yousaf her “full support” and tweeted that “I have full confidence he will appoint a talented cabinet and ministerial team, able to meet the challenges facing the country”. This is the standard obeisance of any defeated leadership candidate who has any regard for convention and politeness. Offering a rival a job they will never accept is a well-worn tactic: Major used it with Kenneth Baker after the 1992 general election, offering the home secretary the much more junior position of Welsh secretary (Baker’s connections to Wales were slender: he had been born in Monmouthshire but moved to London at the age of five); and when he decided that Norman Lamont had passed his sell-by date at the Treasury in May 1993, Major offered the chancellor a switch to the Department of the Environment, remaining in his existing post not being an option. Needless to say, neither man accepted the offer.
There are other, more recent instances. When Charles Clarke’s tenure as home secretary ran into difficulties in 2006 over the accidental release of foreign prisoners from UK jails, Tony Blair (initially keen to retain him) offered him the job of defence secretary, but Clarke declined and left the government. It is not entirely clear what Blair’s motivation was: did he still want to keep the heavyweight Clarke in his team, or had he concluded that his usefulness had dissipated and engineer his removal by his own hand? A clearer-cut case was Jeremy Hunt. When he was defeated for the Conservative leadership by Boris Johnson in July 2019, having served for a year as foreign secretary, he was offered a move to the Ministry of Defence but felt it was a demotion and he would rather go altogether. It seems unlikely Johnson was grieved to see his beaten rival go.
How will Forbes conduct herself? She has emerged from the leadership campaign with an image of honesty and straightforwardness, standing by her personal religious views despite their potential electoral dangers, and even earned the (perhaps slightly mischievous) admiration of the business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch; the Conservative cabinet minister observed:
I actually admire her for not being dishonest. It’s very easy for her to tell lies, just so that she could win that election. And she’s not doing that.
This might, perhaps, be a consolation to the new first minister. It does not portray Forbes as a natural plotter or double-dealer, which may lessen the threat she poses to Yousaf. It is also undoubtedly true that a new leader is likely to want a new finance chief, and the fissures between Yousaf and Forbes which have emerged during the campaign might have made them uneasy colleagues in the Scottish cabinet. Yousaf has also nominated Sturgeon ultra-loyalist Shona Robison as his deputy first minister; she has extensive experience in government, having been health and sport secretary and social justice and housing secretary, and she oversaw the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. But she resigned from the cabinet in 2018 amid statistics which showed that Scotland’s rate of drug deaths was the worst in Europe—though she ascribed her departure to personal circumstances—and an Audit Scotland report in 2021 criticised her as partly responsible for inadequate preparation for the Covid-19 pandemic. She mishandled a number of issues at NHS Tayside, the health board which includes her own constituency of Dundee East, and said her proudest achievement as health secretary was the introduction of minimum unit pricing for alcohol, which Public Health Scotland concluded this year had made little impact on consumption or public health.
Forbes’s strong showing in the leadership election suggests that there is a significant divide within the SNP between left-wing social progressives and more conservative members, a split which has existed since at least the 1970s but has been concealed by a shared support for the central policy of independence. There is also an underlying sectarian tension which does not come naturally to the minds of English observers. The SNP under Sturgeon has become a party with a tendency to take excessively quick offence on behalf of the Catholic community, whose support it has drawn away from the Scottish Labour Party. James Dornan, the MSP for Glasgow Cathcart, has been particularly vocal, saying in 2021 that the party would replace the word “sectarianism” with the phrases “anti-Catholicism” and “anti-Irish racism”. The notion of a progressive independent Scotland has been easy to create in opposition to the unionist culture of Protestantism, especially in the context of football and the “Old Firm” rivalry between Rangers and Celtic.
Against this identification with the urban Catholic population of the central belt, there is the Protestant identity of rural Scotland, both in the south-western counties of Dumfries and Galloway and in the Highlands, where Kate Forbes grew up, and Islands. In these areas, the Presbyterian churches remain influential, and sometimes in extreme forms: sabbatarianism was still strong in the northern islands of the Outer Hebrides until very recently, and attitudes to matters of sex and reproduction are more conservative than in Glasgow or Edinburgh.
Where does this leave the SNP? It is not impossible to imagine the circumstances under which Forbes, freed from ministerial responsibility and active on the backbenches, carves out a vision of an independent Scotland which is distinct from that of Humza Yousaf. She is bright and articulate, thought by many to have acquitted herself well over the weeks of the leadership campaign (though she has also alienated some younger voters for whom LGBT rights and abortion are defining values). The potential to be a thorn in the first minister’s side, as well as a focus of dissent and an ever-available alternative, is there, if she chooses it. In the short term, I suspect she will retreat into dignified silence and allow Yousaf a honeymoon (f he gets one from the wider political community), but the former finance secretary will only turn 33 next month, and has a long journey ahead of her.
Did Yousaf make the right call? My instinct is no: given the closeness of the result, I would have chosen to include her and trying to bind her fate to my own, whether as finance secretary or another substantial job in the Scottish Government like health or education. Perhaps in time she will be invited back, but for the moment the new first minister has taken a gamble. Holyrood will watch carefully to see whether it is successful.