COLIN CAMPBELL: Era when Inverness seat for SNP seemed like a ‘job for life’ is over
A new survey has found that the most popular politician in Scotland by some margin is Highland MSP Kate Forbes.
After narrowly losing out in a torrid campaign for the leadership of the SNP and the role of First Minister, she has largely disappeared from the limelight.
But she stepped briefly back into it at the Edinburgh Book Festival during an appearance in which she admitted she had “dodged a bullet” by losing out in the SNP leadership contest.
On the same night, the winner appeared at the same event and was sworn at foully by a member of the audience. Humza Yousaf kept his cool, and maybe anger, vitriol and contempt bounces off him these days. But he still often wears the fearful expression of a man trying to dodge shrapnel flying all around.
After becoming a new mother, Kate Forbes has plenty of time to spend at home with her bairn. That seems naturally preferable to replacing Nicola Sturgeon as the matriarch of the SNP.
Support for the SNP is in decline. Polls have suggested they could lose more than 20 MPs at the next election.
Labour are clear favourites to oust the SNP in the upcoming Hamilton West and Rutherglen by-election. Advance warning of a likely defeat won’t prevent another outbreak of recriminations if it happens.
If the Hamilton seat is lost, Inverness MP Drew Hendry should be among those looking on with unease.
In the next election, he looks likely to be contesting a newly created constituency with shifting boundaries which takes him into unknown territory. The era when holding a seat for the SNP seemed a job for life is over.
In Inverness and the Highlands and across Scotland the independence marches and rallies have markedly thinned out.
And the prospect of further high-level scandal remains in the background.
Kate Forbes has been spared all this, and left entirely untouched by it. She can look at her popularity ratings with satisfaction from a distance as she enjoys her measured working lifestyle and her motherhood.
If she had won that fateful leadership race she would be in the thick of an SNP horror story.
Supporters of the Union got the outcome they wanted when Humza Yousaf got the top job. This is a man wholly lacking in the inspirational powers – and more importantly the facts and figures – needed to persuade the “unconvinced” of the merits of independence.
But Kate Forbes remains in the background while the dismal SNP saga unfolds. Unless she no longer wants the job, the fates are aligning for her to emerge as the fresh-faced saviour of the SNP, and the woman most likely to lead Scotland to independence, some time in the future.
That will still be a massive uphill and long-term haul from a very low starting point.
But it has been a disastrous year for the SNP and an exceptionally good one for Kate Forbes. In the maternal order of things, these nights she may be losing some sleep, but not because of fears over flying bullets.
