Lucy Dunn

Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf has risked widening the split within the SNP by effectively ousting Kate Forbes from the cabinet. Having dispensed with his leadership rival, Yousaf has now appointed those who will make up his top team – and insists that his choices demonstrate a party united. But for all his warm words, Yousaf appears to have done little to reach across the SNP divide. Instead, he has opted to reward those who have stayed loyal to him throughout his campaign, such as Shona Robison and his campaign manager Neil Gray. Those who backed Forbes are nowhere to be seen. For all his warm words, Yousaf appears to have done little to reach across the SNP divide. Those who backed Forbes are nowhere to be seen.

Humza Yousaf announced on Tuesday, after being voted in by 71 MSPs as Scotland's First Minister, that Shona Robison would be his deputy. The long-term friend of Nicola Sturgeon will now help Yousaf decide who he will appoint to his cabinet, a decision that will set the tone for the next year and a half of his leadership.  While earlier it was unclear what Yousaf would offer Kate Forbes, it was on Tuesday evening revealed that Yousaf’s main competitor has been offered the rural affairs portfolio. Rejecting this offer, Forbes has now quit government and will go to the back benches.

It was announced to a particularly tense room at 2 p.m. that Humza Yousaf had won the SNP leadership race. The contest was expected to be close and many people assumed that if second preferences were accounted for, Kate Forbes would most likely prevail. Ash Regan’s voters didn’t quite manage to swing it in Forbes’s favour and Yousaf won by just over 2,000 votes. He is set to become both the youngest first minister of Scotland, and the first Muslim leader in the UK.

Whatever your thoughts on the SNP, the Union or indeed Scotland, it cannot be denied that Nicola Sturgeon will leave a permanent mark on Britain’s political landscape. Whether that mark is good or bad will no doubt be the focus of intense debate for years to come. Making her 286th and final First Minister’s Questions closing speech this week, the usually immovable First Minister was close to tears. This resignation is to her likely bittersweet given she did not end up achieving Scottish independence. And this raises the question: after holding the first minister position for eight years, what actually changed in that time?

The final debate of the SNP leadership contest, which took place last night, came after a weekend of upheaval for the party. The SNP chief executive Peter Murrell resigned on Saturday. His resignation followed that of Murray Foote, the SNP's head of communications, who accused the party of telling him to make false statements to the press. And Ash Regan’s campaign team called for the contest to be restarted after revelations about falling membership numbers (and their cover-up) surfaced nearly a week into voting opening. Viewers (or listeners) were understandably unsure how last night’s debate on Times Radio would proceed, given that the very integrity of the Scottish National party, and some of the candidates’ campaigns, has been under intense scrutiny.

First, it was Nicola Sturgeon. Now her husband Peter Murrell has resigned as SNP chief executive after a scandal about covering up a fall in party membership numbers. He quit after being told that unless he did so by midday he’d face a confidence vote. That this happened on a Saturday lunchtime shows the disarray now engulfing the SNP hierarchy. It started yesterday when Murray Foote resigned as SNP parliamentary communications director. He said he had been misled (perhaps by Murrell himself) when he rubbished reports – calling them 'drivel' – that SNP membership had slid from 103,884 to 72,186 amidst frustrations about Sturgeon's Gender Recognition Reform Bill. If Foote quit for having unwittingly misled the public, what are the implications for Murrell?

After pressure applied by Ash Regan and Kate Forbes, and belatedly Humza Yousaf, the Scottish National party’s national executive committee has been told that the party's membership has decreased by a third: from 103,884 members in 2021 to 72,186 members now. Kate Forbes’s campaign team says that these ‘plummeting membership figures shows continuity won’t cut it’, while Ash Regan’s team has heralded the announcement as a triumph and noted ‘there has been a significant reduction in membership numbers since October 2022 following the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) fiasco’.  This follows allegations of election rigging after Ash Regan, with the support of Kate Forbes’s campaign, looked to be declaring all out war on the SNP establishment.

The fourth and final debate of the SNP leadership contest aired from Edinburgh last night with a live studio audience ready to pounce on the contenders. So how did the candidates fare in the final debate of the contest, and who came out on top? While Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are now all accustomed to dealing with long Q&A sessions at hustings, the BBC’s mixed voter audience was more hostile than they are used to. Initial questions focused on the NHS and the economy, but the debate really livened up after one audience member lambasted the candidates for their ‘total lack of acceptance of accountability’.

After a tumultuous two weeks, voting is now open for the SNP leadership elections until 27 March. But are members any closer to knowing who they'll vote for? At the Glasgow hustings, Michael Russell, president of the SNP, urged members to get their votes in as soon as possible. But while the Scottish National party appears keen to see the majority of votes cast within the next few days, it is worthwhile remembering just how many ‘undecideds’ there were in the last SNP member poll. A third of those questioned by Savanta didn’t know who they’d be backing, while another third expressed their support for Humza Yousaf and a quarter said they’d back Kate Forbes.

With only a day to go until voting for the next SNP leader starts, candidates don’t have long left to convince members to back them. So perhaps it’s little wonder that tensions are running high. The favourite for the contest Humza Yousaf has secured the backing of John Swinney, with the Deputy First Minister publicly endorsing Yousaf this weekend as his preferred candidate for SNP leader.  Nicola Sturgeon has said she will not endorse a candidate but as Swinney is her close ally the move has raised eyebrows – particularly given the timing.

Have the SNP leadership candidates learned from the mistakes of their first televised debate? Kate Forbes, Humza Yousaf and Ash Regan competed to trash the SNP's legacy when they went head-to-head earlier this week. Last night's Channel 4 clash was tamer: the trio were at pains to defend their party's record in government. But while the atmosphere was more civil, viewers didn't learn a huge amount more about the candidates' plans for Scotland. Kate Forbes was quick to plaster over Tuesday’s wounds, saying that it has been a ‘privilege to serve alongside Humza Yousaf in government and to serve under Nicola Sturgeon’ – though she did not apologise to Yousaf, when prodded by host Krishnan Guru-Murthy, for her attacks two days previously.

Independence was the main focus at the first hustings of the SNP leadership race last night. Humza Yousaf called for a slower route to separation. Ash Regan clarified the workings of her ‘voter empowerment mechanism’. But Kate Forbes unveiled a more radical approach: announcing she would fight for another independence referendum within three months of the 2024 general election. ‘For too many years, we’ve become the party of referendums,’ Forbes said, ‘rather than the party of independence.’ But, in an apparent contradiction, she then pledged to ‘fight for the right’ to hold an independence vote within three months of the next general election.

Kate Forbes has finally managed to shake off questions about equal marriage. The SNP leadership contender has been busy instead talking about Scotland's crumbling health service – and how she'd fix it. It's looking like Forbes, if successful, will scrap the Sturgeon-Yousaf National Care Service, back an independent inquiry into Scotland’s healthcare system and enter into considerations about the long-term future of the NHS. Will any of this help turn around a failing health service? Forbes said today during her speech at Reform Scotland's event, a health service inquiry would be an 'excellent idea'.

Is Ash Regan the dark horse in the SNP leadership race? Kate Forbes and Humza Yousaf are the frontrunners, yet in a race full of surprises, Regan's chances should not be ruled out. The 48-year-old MSP for Edinburgh Eastern resigned in protest over gender self ID. Now she has returned as the candidate for change from the Nicola Sturgeon era – but might her ties to another former SNP leader, Alex Salmond, prove to be her undoing? Regan is clear about what went wrong for the SNP under its outgoing leader: ‘Kids in the playground can see that there have been some issues in the SNP of late,’ she says when I meet her at her campaign launch in North Queensferry in Fife. ‘Our movement has been divided for far too long by petty differences and personal agendas.