Is Humza Yousaf’s campaign starting to sink?

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. It is all but futile to suggest, as Yousaf did yesterday, that two such authoritative figures were telling untruths for political ends. 

Perhaps they are colluding; I don’t know. Alex Neil is indeed backing Forbes’s campaign. Alex Salmond, now leading the breakaway Alba party, is assumed to be supporting the former community safety minister Ash Regan, who certainly appears to be backing much of Salmond’s policy agenda.