Iain Macwhirter

You thought this SNP leadership election couldn't get any more bizarre. It just did. Two of the candidates have effectively accused the leadership of their party of suspected ballot-rigging. Kate Forbes and Ash Regan have called for an independent auditor to be brought in to ensure the conduct of the ballot is 'transparent, fair and equitable'. They clearly do not trust the party's chief executive, Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, to conduct this election honestly. Ash Regan said straight out that having Murrell in charge of the election is like 'Carrie counting the votes for Boris's successor'.

The SNP establishment – the Sturgeonites – are trying to give the SNP membership an offer they can’t refuse. Swallow your doubts and just vote as you are told: that is, for Humza Yousaf. If you don’t, beware the consequences: a split in the party, the collapse of the Green coalition, the departure of key figures and even the loss of government itself. A number of ministers, including Nicola Sturgeon’s closest ally, social justice secretary, Shona Robison, are saying they would have trouble serving in a government led by Kate Forbes. In other words, if Humza loses they’ll take their support away.  Nationalists like the former SNP minister, Marco Biagi, have been ramping up the warnings about a split on social media.

‘Now is not the time,’ successive Tory prime ministers told Nicola Sturgeon following her persistent calls for another independence referendum. It’s simply too soon after the last one, they said. In August, the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, caused fury in nationalist circles after he stated there would need to be at least 60 per cent support for independence in opinion polls before the UK government would respond to further Section 30 referendum requests. Strange, then, that this Tory message appears to be exactly what the SNP leadership candidates were parroting in Tuesday night’s now infamous STV debate.

Scotland has the worst drug death rate in Europe. More than half a million Scots are on hospital waiting lists. The NHS is being privatised by stealth as more and more Scots go private. We don’t hear much about this in the endless SNP leadership hustings. Instead there is an air of self-congratulation that things aren’t worse. Candidates have distanced themselves from the Scottish government’s chaotic deposit return scheme for bottles and cans. But that isn’t the only environmental disaster waiting to happen. Sales of petrol and diesel cars in Scotland are to be banned in seven years, yet the electric charging infrastructure is so bad people are turning away from electric vehicles.

The SNP leadership has turned into open civil war. Alex Salmond has shafted the frontrunner Humza Yousaf who tried to shaft Kate Forbes, who was, in turn, shafted by Nicola Sturgeon. No wonder long-suffering deputy First Minister, John Swinney, has resigned.  Swinney’s departure came on the day Salmond torpedoed Yousaf, Sturgeon’s chosen successor, by claiming he had skipped Holyrood's landmark gay marriage vote in 2014 due to 'religious pressure'. Yousaf says his ‘recollection is different’, but his position is now untenable. His account is contradicted by the minister who was in charge of the 2014 equal marriage vote, Alex Neil, and now the then first minister, Salmond.

Is the Windsor Framework a get-out-of-jail card for Scottish nationalists? The excitement expressed in SNP circles at Rishi Sunak’s Protocol breakthrough yesterday was palpable. For if remaining in the EU single market while staying in the UK is good for Northern Ireland, surely this could be the case too for an independent Scotland? Isn’t this the ‘best of both worlds’ scenario that Nicola Sturgeon always asked for: borderless trade with the UK after Scotland joins the EU single market? A bonanza for Scottish businesses, who would be able to access markets in Europe free from Brexit red tape? Perhaps even a ‘Holyrood Brake’ to ensure that the Scottish Parliament can axe EU laws it doesn’t like? Unfortunately, it does not work quite like that.

There’s a fourth person in this SNP leadership race, only he’s not on the ticket and he can’t be elected as leader. The former SNP leader and First Minister, Alex Salmond is using this chaotic leadership election to engineer his rehabilitation.  Ash Regan, the former community safety minister, who launched her leadership campaign on Friday is a Salmond protege. She echoed his call for an 'independence convention' to bring all independence parties together, including Mr Salmond’s breakaway Alba party. This would propel Alex Salmond back into the centre stage of Scottish politics. He would be a big presence in such a body, given his experience and history – not to mention his ego. It would be the Salmond show redux. Ash Regan is her own woman, of course.

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working on the sabbath.

Scottish nationalists are shell-shocked after their leader did a bunk on Wednesday. And with good reason. Nicola Sturgeon left the SNP leaderless, directionless, failing on almost every policy front – from the NHS to bottle recycling – and with a legislative time bomb in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which is due to go off just as their new leader is installed at the end of March. It will probably destroy the Scottish coalition well before then. Indeed, the 18-month-old union with the Scottish Greens, another of Sturgeon’s personal initiatives, is unlikely to last the week.  Attempts by pro-GRR Bill loyalists to keep the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, out of the leadership race by demonising her as a bigot on social media, have failed.

Dazed and confused by their leader’s sudden departure, Scottish nationalists are now deeply worried that Nicola Sturgeon has taken the independence dream with her. She hasn’t of course. Independence is a long game and there remain many true believers. However the chances of transforming the Scottish National party’s immense electoral success into a referendum on independence in the near term seem remote.    Some in the movement are wondering if the referendum route is still viable since it has been driven into a legal cul de sac by Nicola Sturgeon’s discredited idea of turning the next general election into a 'de facto' referendum on independence. That ploy is now surely dead.

Nicola Sturgeon insisted last month she had 'plenty in the tank', but apparently the First Minister was already running on empty. Announcing her resignation this morning, Sturgeon said she finally decided to step down only yesterday at the funeral of a long-serving SNP activist. However she also made clear she had begun to realise over the past year she no longer had the energy to give '100 per cent' to the job. In an emotional press conference at Bute House in Edinburgh, Sturgeon insisted she could have 'led the party to independence'. But she conceded that her personality was becoming a liability: 'Fixed opinions about me are becoming a barrier to reasoned debate,' she said. It was time to hand over the reins to someone, she implied, with a lesser personality.

It is vanishingly rare for the SNP-supporting paper The National – a publication that makes Pravda look like the Washington Post – to place anything remotely critical of Nicola Sturgeon on its front page. Yet on Wednesday it warned that the Dear Leader’s ploy to turn the 2024 general election into a ‘de facto referendum’ could ‘Blow It For Indy’. It is right. The idea looks like being about as popular as placing rapists in a woman’s jail. The plan, unveiled by the First Minister in high dudgeon last November, after the Supreme Court rejected her bill to hold an ‘advisory’ referendum on independence, was to present Scottish voters with a one line manifesto before the next Westminster vote in or around 2024.

Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has led a charmed life. Even her sternest critics agree that she is immensely talented, one of the UK’s most successful politicians, a master of detail and an effective communicator. She has been at the pinnacle of public life for two decades. But all things must pass. Nearly ten years after she took over as leader from Alex Salmond just about everything is going wrong at once. Hospital waiting lists lengthen, teacher strikes roll on, council service cuts deepen, the ambitious plan for a Social Care Commission has stalled. Across the board the SNP government appears to have made a right royal mess of just about every policy for which it has responsibility.

Could the extraordinary scandal of transgender sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons come at any worse a time for Nicola Sturgeon? Only days after her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was stalled by Westminster’s government on the grounds that it might have an 'adverse impact' on women's safety, it emerged that women have already been endangered by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS). In their anticipation of this very legislation, Scottish prisons have been allowing male sex offenders to routinely self-identify as women for almost a decade. How was this allowed to happen? How did the First Minister not know until last week that rapists, such as Isla Bryson (formerly Adam Graham), were being housed in women’s prisons?

When Rishi Sunak had dinner with Nicola Sturgeon last week, the idea was to show he was interested in a friendly relationship: a ‘constructive dialogue’. Liz Truss had dismissed Sturgeon as an ‘attention seeker’ who was ‘best ignored’, but Sunak preferred a more positive approach. He was keen to pose for pictures afterwards. This new friendship lasted four days. Sturgeon is now accusing Sunak of ‘a full-frontal attack on the democratically elected Scottish parliament’ because he has become the first Prime Minister in history to veto a bill passed there – the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Sturgeon has put on a virtuoso performance of grievance.

‘Shadowbanning’, ‘visibility filtering’, ‘de-amplification’ – the Twitter Files released since Elon Musk took over have given us a new and sinister language of digital censorship. I am no fan of Musk’s capricious self-promotion. His vanity appals me and his vindictive attacks on former Twitter employees are gross. However, I credit him with telling us more about the inner workings of social media in two weeks than we learned in the last two decades. As in a palace coup, there is often a moment of transparency before the next dictator takes over. Of course, the Twitter Files have to be taken with a high degree of scepticism. They are partisan to the extent that Elon Musk sees himself as a crusader against what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’.

Two self delusions have sustained the SNP through the past couple of decades of devolution. The first is the perennial grievance that deteriorating public services are the result of Westminster austerity. The second is that Scotland’s social problems can be solved through redistribution – by taxing the rich. Both have now collapsed in the face of harsh reality. Low-growth Scotland generates less wealth each year, there are precious free rich left to tax and the public sector remains utterly dependent on financial life-support from the UK exchequer. This is an economy of almost colonial dependency, far removed from the image of independence propaganda. Deputy first minister John Swinney’s latest Scottish Budget remains very firmly in the land of delusion.