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. But rural affairs is not going to be a priority under Yousaf either. He’s a city boy. He loves cities so much that he represents one while living in another. He shows no particular interest in or understanding of rural Scotland. That he considers the rural affairs post a demotion with which to punish an opponent is perhaps an indication of the regard in which he holds this brief. For Forbes to have taken it under these circumstances would have been to acquiesce in an act of disrespect for communities that have been disrespected more than enough by the SNP.
For now, she is remaining loyal in public:
Forbes was tough on Yousaf during the leadership contest, highlighting his record of consistent failure as transport, then justice and latterly health minister. She warned that ‘continuity won’t cut it’ and that it would be ‘an acceptance of mediocrity’. These were hardly veiled references to a man who has been responsible for more policy, political and personal gaffes than almost any other minister in the SNP’s 16 years in power. He has now made her pay the price for challenging him rather than allowing him to inherit the crown from Sturgeon uncontested.
It is an early and unfortunate sign that Yousaf intends to take to Bute House all the worst qualities of his decade on the ministerial benches. The short temper, the surliness, the snidery, the uncontrolled ego. A wiser, cooler head might have considered the very tight leadership results – Yousaf only won on second preferences, 52 to 48 per cent – and decided it was prudent to keep his opponent close to him.
As it is, he’s humiliated someone who came within the margin of error of being elected SNP leader and waved her off to the backbenches. That’s either a very brave call or a very stupid one, and Yousaf isn’t brave.
In his victory speech on Monday, Yousaf pledged to heal the party’s divisions. The leadership contest itself was fractious but so too were recent rows over gender law reform and putting male prisoners in women’s jails. Treating Forbes as he has is bound to rub salt in these particular wounds.
Yousaf, like Sturgeon before him, is very much a creature of the political-media-activist bubble and Forbes, a fiscal moderate and social conservative, is unpopular in that bubble. But nearly half of SNP members liked her enough to entrust her with their vote for party leader and de facto head of the independence movement. If you were one of these members, it will be hard not to feel that, in dismissing Forbes, Yousaf is dismissing you too.
A running theme in the leadership election was the need to regain public trust in the SNP’s ability to run the Scottish government competently. That reputation has taken a hit in no small part thanks to Yousaf, who as health secretary has presided over the worst A&E waiting times on record, as well as missing SNP-imposed targets on everything from cancer treatment to mental health support for children.
In seeing to it that Forbes returns to the backbenches, he has denied his government the only SNP minster with a reputation for competence. We can’t yet know what impact that will have on his efforts to pull the Scottish government out of its various crises, but it’s hard to imagine it helping.
Forbes’s barbs evidently hurt Yousaf, a politician who is highly sensitive to criticism, and her exclusion from the government will please those for whom her heresies on progressive identity politics outweigh her talent for connecting with floating voters. But failing to keep her on the team is a mistake. The government will pay the price for it. The party will pay the price for it. In the long run, Humza Yousaf might too.
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