Humza Yousaf looks most likely to succeed Nicola Sturgeon

Good morning. What’s going on in the SNP leadership contest? Who do I think is going to win? Some thoughts on that below.

If you’re attacking, you’re losing?

What should we make of the bitter turn in the Scottish National party leadership election? Kate Forbes, the finance minister, has doubled down on her attacks on the ministerial record of Humza Yousaf, the man regarded by most observers as her main rival.

“When you were transport minister, the trains were never on time, when you were justice minister, the police were strained to breaking point and now as health minister we’ve got record-high waiting times,” Forbes told Yousaf.

SNP minister Shona Robison, a former Scottish health secretary and backer of Yousaf’s, has accused Forbes of “undermining” Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy and “trashing” the Scottish government. On top of all that, she has called on Forbes to provide “full transparency” on her views on abortion.

Some of the subtext here is pretty easy to parse. Forbes is a staunch member of the Free Church of Scotland, which takes a strongly conservative position on abortion, sex outside of marriage and same-sex marriages. What Robison means when she calls for “full transparency” is, “I would like to remind SNP members that Kate Forbes is a social conservative”.

In an internal election, candidates who think they are ahead do not unleash no-holds-barred attacks on their rivals because they know it will make it harder for them to run the party afterwards.

So my hunch from this is we can assume that Humza Yousaf is the man in the box seat in the SNP leadership election. But we still don’t have any reliably solid information on what SNP members make of all this. However, my anecdotal impression from talking to rank-and-file SNP activists is that attacking the record of the Scottish government is as big a no-no as you can possibly imagine.

But in all parties there is a divide between a party’s activists — who go leafleting, who attend party conferences, who helpfully email, call or text journalists with their thoughts about the state of their party — and its armchair members, who essentially just pay their direct debit, vote in leadership elections and do very little else.

It’s possible that the party’s membership is in a very different place on this compared with its activist base, but not, I think, particularly likely. Ultimately Yousaf has the greatest number of MSP and MP endorsements out of all the candidates, in a party that is famously hierarchical and averse to public infighting. I assume, even before you get into anything else that might influence SNP members, just being the candidate with the most support from party elders is a boost to your chances of leading the SNP.

In that respect, as in many others, they are wholly unlike the Conservatives or the Labour party. But parties change: one big and important change in the Labour party in recent years is the party — not just the MPs, but the party as a whole — has become obsessed with winning. It preoccupies their activists as much as it does the front bench. And one big and important change in the Conservative party is that the membership has become much less deferential to its MPs. So it’s again possible that there is a similar shift occurring in the SNP and that Forbes’ criticism of her opponent’s ministerial record and government is helping not hurting her.

But I doubt it frankly, in part because polls of Scottish voters all tend to look like this recent one from Redfield and Wilton:

Yes, Forbes is the preferred choice of Scottish voters as a whole. But Humza Yousaf is the preferred choice of SNP voters.

These polls come with a huge, huge health warning: what voters want and what party members want is often not aligned. There is no reason to think that SNP members are looking and thinking in the same way as SNP voters, let alone the country as a whole.

Indeed, the members of the SNP, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats look a lot like each other in demographics: they are people in their 50s and 60s, with middle or higher incomes and in possession of at least one a degree. That is not reflected in the make-up of their voters.

But it just seems pretty unlikely to me that SNP members are going to cleave from the stance of SNP parliamentarians and pick a candidate who a) they are at odds with on social issues b) has criticised the Scottish government c) has been vocally criticised by many of the party’s power brokers.

My view at the start of this contest was that Humza Yousaf remains the most likely candidate to win and that remains the case.

Now try this

I saw What’s Love Got To Do With It? It’s a film near-perfectly calibrated for me to like it, and it has some nicely observed asides. But criminally for a romance, the two leads — Lily James and Shazad Latif — have essentially zero chemistry, Emma Thompson’s character is grating, implausible and a waste of a talented actor, and plot threads are picked up and then dropped all too often. Watch Paris, 13th District instead.

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