Kate Forbes quitting is a nightmare for the SNP

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether. 

After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over. It is widely understood that Forbes was the last remaining SNP minister that business leaders had any confidence in. Yousaf has exacted his revenge on a political rival but at a price to the relationship between Bute House and the nation’s entrepreneurs. 

Now, some will say that Forbes, a Highland MSP, ought to have taken the rural affairs job and used it to improve the lot of those parts of Scotland that were neglected under Sturgeon’s government.