Iain Macwhirter

None of the candidates for the SNP leadership has declared yet, but it is shaping up to be a classic two horse race between the former leader, and Nicola Sturgeon bag man, John Swinney and the socially conservative former finance secretary, Kate Forbes. But in this race, they are both losers before they start. To turn to a chess metaphor, the SNP is caught in a zugzwang: they have to make a move but every move puts them in a worse position.  Kate Forbes is – shock – a practising Christian First: the veteran 'safe pair of hands', John Swinney. He’s the not-so-fresh face of the 'old guard' who effectively blocked Humza Yousaf's deal with Alex Salmond’s Alba.

After the tears, the recriminations. Just who scuppered the putative deal between Humza Yousaf and Ash Regan MSP that could have saved Yousaf’s bacon? The Alba leader, Alex Salmond, told the BBC’s World at One that Humza Yousaf had been on the phone to Regan at 7.30 a.m. today to say that her terms were ‘very reasonable’. It was, Salmond implied, a done deal.  Sturgeon was not going to be content with any kind of deal that gave Salmond indirect influence over the fate of the Scottish National party Clearly, others in the SNP thought differently, and five hours later, Humza Yousaf was making a tearful farewell to Bute House.

Did Humza Yousaf think it through? When he decided, late on Wednesday night, to pull the plug on the Green-SNP coalition arrangement, did he game-out the consequences? That is the question political Scotland is asking this morning as Yousaf’s job hangs, by common agreement, in the balance 24 hours after he unilaterally ended the Bute House cooperation agreement. So Humza Yousaf could possibly live to fight another day Did he consider the possibility that, by dumping his Green coalition partners so abruptly, he was likely to hand the fate of his administration, effectively, to Alex Salmond, leader of the breakaway Alba party and one of his greatest political foes? For that seems to be what has happened. Salmond is smirking fit to burst.

I have not been entirely flattering about the performance in government of the Scottish Green party ministers, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater. I have accused them of being responsible for most of the policy failures that have defined Humza Yousaf’s annus horribilis. Everything from the Deposit Return Scheme for bottles and cans to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill; the Hate Crime Act to the ban on wood burning stoves.   But it is time for me to put the record straight and say that the Greens aren’t all bad. Some of my friends have been Green and a few even remain in the party – though with increasing annoyance at its policies on women’s rights.

There is what can only be described as a mood of despair in SNP circles following the news that the former party chief executive Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, has been re-arrested and charged with 'embezzlement of funds from the Scottish National party'. It is the latest shocking twist in the long-running investigation into SNP fund-raising and finances called Operation Branchform. Mr Murrell has now resigned from the party. He was first arrested 'as a suspect' in April last year but was then released without charge. At the time, a £110,000 Niesmann and Bischoff campervan was seized by police from outside Mr Murrell’s mother’s Dunfermline home.

It was Cop26 in Glasgow and Nicola Sturgeon was in her element, posing for selfies with Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough and assorted world leaders. The then first minister was desperate to upstage Boris Johnson who had very much put his mark on the global climate shindig. 'It’s one minute to midnight on the Doomsday clock,' the prime minister warned the assembled green lobbyists and corporate CEOs, 'and we need to act now'. He promised to cut UK greenhouse gas emissions by 68 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero by 2050. Nicola Sturgeon just had to go one better. Scotland would cut emissions by 75 per cent she promised, and would make this 'legally binding' so there could be no backsliding on what she called 'the most stretching climate targets in the world'.

For an image of the ‘progressive nationalism’ that has disfigured Scottish public life over the past decade, look no further than the Scottish Green party MSP Maggie Chapman. She was one of the driving forces behind the SNP-Green government’s attempts to make Scotland a testing ground for transgender ideology. Along with her Green party colleagues, Chapman is a major reason why Scottish voters are turning against the coalition government. During the row over the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, Chapman called for the Scottish government to ‘explore’ the possibility of allowing children to change legal sex from age 8. She also scolded textbooks that suggested sex is binary, and said that we can’t be sure what sex people are unless they had their chromosomes tested.

Scotland's Hate Crime Act (HCA) has, by common agreement, been an unmitigated disaster. Less than a week old, there are already calls for it to be repealed – like the equally misconceived but more awfully named Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. The police are now clearly hesitant of arresting anyone for hate crime The police have been swamped with thousands of complaints, many vexatious, all of which they are pledged to investigate. JK Rowling has blown the doors off with her ‘arrest me’ tweets, but the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, attracted more hate crime complaints in the first two days than she did. SNP Ministers like Siobhan Brown have been ridiculed for misrepresenting their own law.

Would you trust this lot with assisted dying? The Scottish parliament’s record on issues of personal liberty has been pretty dire. Yet MSPs seem mustard-keen to introduce medically-supervised suicide as proposed by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam McArthur. His Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today, is the third such Bill to hit Holyrood and the betting is that this one will go the distance. I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia ‘Too often’, says Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader. ‘Dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind.

The Scottish government’s illiberal Hate Crime and Public Order Act isn’t even being enforced yet and already Police Scotland are being accused of behaving like a pound shop Stasi. The Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser discovered last week that police had recorded him as a perpetrator of a ‘hate incident’ without informing him or giving him a chance to defend himself. An anonymous trans activist complained last year about a tweet in which the MSP had suggested that identifying as a non-binary was no more valid than ‘identifying as a cat’. He was not addressing any individual but responding to the Scottish government’s Non-Binary Action Plan.

Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf has plenty to worry about right now with the imminent implementation of his much-criticised Hate Crime crackdown. But there is mounting anxiety within the SNP about something else: the progress, or lack of it, of the police probe into the party's finances. Activists always put two and two together and come up with Unionist Perfidy It is nearly a year now since Nicola Sturgeon’s home was raided by police, as part of Operation Branchform, their investigation into what happened to £660,000 of donations for a referendum campaign that never took place. The nation was agog last April as stony-faced officers descended on the former first minister’s home and put up that blue forensics tent.

From next month in Scotland you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. You think I’m joking – that this is an April Fool come early. I only wish it was. In two weeks' time, this will be the law of the land in Scotland under the SNP’s iniquitous Hate Crime Act which makes 'stirring up hatred' a criminal offence punishable by 7 years in jail.   The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is a 'third-party reporting centre' set up by Police Scotland to make it easier to accuse someone of hate crime. There will be 411 of these snitching centres across Scotland located everywhere from mushroom farms to caravan sites.

Humza Yousaf has a gift for landing himself at the centre of crises of his own making. One recalls his advice during Covid for people to 'think twice' before calling 999 for an ambulance or his asking a group of Ukrainian women refugees 'where are all the men'.  More recently there was his Quixotic defence of XL Bully dogs and the futile backing of the former health secretary, Michael Matheson, over his iPad expenses. These were unforced errors he could ill afford. Now Humza Yousaf has managed to confect an extraordinary media storm over an apparently innocuous government donation of £250,000 to a Gaza relief organisation, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The return of 'Gorgeous' George Galloway to the House of Commons may not be Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare, but it is certainly the recurrence of a bad dream. No one who recalls how Galloway harried Tony Blair over the Iraq war twenty years ago can deny that the new Workers Party MP for Rochdale can be a powerful Commons speaker. His Old Testament-style may seem ridiculous to many, like his adoption of that fedora – which he presumably will have to discard in the hatless debating chamber – but on issues of war, and the plight of the dispossessed, he can certainly rouse emotion. His declamatory style goes down well in the mosques attended by Galloway's many Muslim voters, who applaud his campaign's condemnation of 'genocide' in Gaza.

It may seem perverse to claim that the former first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon saved the Union between Scotland and England. She is after all a Scottish nationalist who has dedicated her life to the cause of Scottish independence. But her actions since she resigned exactly one year ago from her post as First Minister have set the independence cause back by at least 20 years, perhaps longer. Labour is back in contention in Scotland; no one is talking about an independence referendum any more; the SNP is now a divided party with a collapsing membership and a weak leader who has presided over a catalogue of policy failures. The dream, it seems, is over.