The fall of Sturgeon’s House of Cards

Gripped by in-fighting, dogged by a string of controversies and bitterly divided over policy. As SNP’s Commons leader falls victim to the Men in Grey Kilts, are we now witnessing...

THE announcement that Ian Blackford is to step down as the SNP’s leader at Westminster is big news. The Nationalists are, after all, the third biggest party in the House of Commons and Blackford has become a nationally recognised figure, his regular tirades against the Government on behalf of ‘the sovereign people of Scotland’ as familiar as they are tiresome.

But Blackford’s announcement says something important about his own party, something that the current leadership would rather we didn’t focus on. Whisper it, but could we finally be in the dying days of SNP hegemony?

The polls don’t show it yet, but the party is displaying all the traditional signs of empires when they fall into irrelevance and impotence: division, disagreement on the way forward, arguments over who should be in charge, the promotion of controversial policies, incompetent administration.

It’s like watching a slow-motion film of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, except with more flags and fewer chariot races.

The SNP’s biggest strength was also its greatest weakness. When you base your entire political mission on the attainment of a single aim – Scottish independence – everything depends on persuading your followers the aim is about to be achieved.

In election after election since the referendum of 2014, the Nationalists have triumphed on the back of Yes voters angry at the failure of the traditional parties to share their ambition. Nicola Sturgeon’s party has dominated the Scottish political landscape ever since.

But as soon as the Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood had no authority to legislate for a second independence referendum, the SNP’s defining mission was suddenly transformed from a vote magnet to a millstone around its neck.

If they can no longer legitimately claim to be leading Scotland out of the Union, then what is the SNP for?

There have been occasions when the party has found the attention that comes with power to be uncomfortable. With a massive increase in its representation at Westminster in 2015, party organisers only discovered some of their candidates’ weaknesses after they had entered the Commons.

Before she was elected as the MP for Glasgow East, for example, Natalie McGarry was known only as a feisty campaigner in Women for Indeleaving pendence. It was only after she became an MP that her lightfingered tendencies emerged (she embezzled £25,000 from her campaign organisation).

Then there was the Rutherglen MP, Margaret Ferrier, who endangered colleagues and fellow passengers when she travelled by train between London and Glasgow during the pandemic, even when she knew she was suffering from Covid.

More political challenges have also been mounted against the SNP’s public appearance of unity.

Former justice minister Kenny MacAskill and his Commons colleague Neale Hanvey, the Kirkcaldy MP, abandoned the SNP to join Alex Salmond’s breakaway nationalist outfit, the SNP angry and embarrassed. On each occasion the SNP sought to play down the damage these events did to the party, but each of these occasions served only to chip away at the SNP’s claim to be Scotland’s champions.

Last month’s Supreme Court ruling could have re-energised the independence movement, sparking a groundswell of anger and indignation at Westminster’s refusal to grant Scotland the powers to determine its own future. Instead, SNP activists responded, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Paltry numbers took to the windswept streets in an attempt to whip up outrage among their fellow Scots. But even they didn’t look like they were particularly enthused, so why should anyone else be?

And now we have the departure of one of the biggest figures in the Nationalist movement. Blackford has always been a divisive figure.

Even before he was elected to parliament he gained the reputation as a pugnacious and ruthless campaigner, vindictively targeting the former Lib Dem leader, the late Charlie Kennedy, in his Ross, Skye and Lochaber seat in a vicious way that Kennedy’s close friends and supporters will never forgive.

He was elected leader of the SNP group at Westminster in 2017 and his familiar bark has become instantly recognisable in the Commons since. Devotedly loyal to his boss, the First Minister, his departure is yet another sign that Miss Sturgeon’s grip over her party is not what it was.

Blackford’s leadership came under fire after he privately encouraged his parliamentary colleagues to support the former chief whip, Patrick Grady, after he was accused of sexual misconduct.

When it was widely reported that Aberdeen MP Stephen Flynn was considering challenging Blackford for the party’s top job at Westminster, the party machinery roared into action to protect the incumbent. Those efforts worked, but only for a short while.

The Men in Grey Kilts seem to have persuaded Blackford that his support in the SNP group – despite Miss Sturgeon’s backing – is too shallow for him to carry on.

It’s bad news that the First Minister can ill afford and reinforces the impression that since the Supreme Court ruling, little has gone right for her party. Even her own ‘Plan C’ – to turn the next UK general election into a ‘de facto’ independence referendum – has gone down badly with parts of her party, not least among her MPs, many of whom fear the loss of their own seats if voters are told that a vote for them is actually a vote for independence.

And a new leader at Westminster will inevitably encourage some to ask when the SNP as a whole will see a new face at the top. Seven years is pretty near the tail end of the eight-year period that is traditionally seen as the maximum that most politicians can serve before their party (and electorate) becomes restless.

Voters (as well as MSPs and MPs) can easily become bored with any leader, and Miss Sturgeon herself has made no secret of the fact that she is actively considering what life might look like after she leaves office.

It’s almost impossible for the Scottish Government to distract voters from their problems over an independence campaign that has run into the sand when ministers have made no secret of the fact that they consider independence to be the most important issue facing Scotland.

But even if they wanted to, how can Miss Sturgeon and her cabinet present their record in office as anything other than woefully disappointing?

It was confirmed this week that Scotland’s census, needlessly delayed for a year so that for the first time in history it was not run at the same time as England’s, will cost taxpayers an extra £6million after so few people participated that the deadline had to be extended by four weeks.

It was an unforced, expensive error that led one Conservative MSP to condemn the SNP’s obsession over ‘manufactured differences’ in order to justify the uncoupling of the English and Scottish surveys. And then there’s the ferries. There’s always the ferries.

It was bad enough that an initial contract to build two badly needed ships to serve Scotland’s vulnerable island communities ballooned from £97million to £340million.

It was even worse that five years later, neither of the vessels has been completed.

But this week it was revealed that Scotland’s Auditor General has failed in his efforts to find out where £130million of public money given to troubled shipyard Ferguson Marine has disappeared to.

At a time when ordinary Scottish families are struggling to pay their household bills, the ongoing shambles of the SNP’s shipbuilding efforts are a national embarrassment, and in any other country would have spelled the doom of at

‘Voters can easily become bored with any leader’ ‘Chosen romantic failure over gradualism’

least one minister, if not the First Minister herself.

It is the signs of division, rather than evidence of incompetence, that will give Miss Sturgeon the most sleepless nights. Her own success and the electoral dominance of her party was largely founded on unity. Party standing orders were even rewritten in 2015 to prevent any SNP member from publicly criticising either policy or elected official.

But recently – and it may well not be coincidental that it has occurred just as the Supreme Court dealt a body-blow to the SNP’s referendum hopes – that unity has started to fracture in a very public way.

Last week the Commons voted to refer Nationalist MP John Nicolson to the Committee of Privileges over a dispute with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.

Unusually, only 16 of Nicolson’s colleagues voted against the motion and in defence of the Ochil and South Perthshire MP – which means 27 SNP MPs abstained, choosing valiantly to sit on their principles and say nothing at all. But their

silence still spoke volumes. And former high-ranking and influential SNP figures have not held back in their criticism of Miss Sturgeon and her strategies.

Alex Bell, former head of policy to Mr Salmond when the latter was First Minister, was scathing about Sturgeon’s plans for a ‘de facto’ referendum. ‘Emotional nationalism has chosen the next UK general election as its Culloden. The SNP has chosen romantic failure over pragmatic gradualism. Perhaps people can see the leadership as the pretenders they are.’

Bell was not alone in his contempt for Sturgeon’s plight. Kevin Pringle, another former senior SNP Government adviser, warned his party that the fight for independence will be a long, hard slog.

He wrote: ‘Independence can be achieved, and in my view one day will be. But an independent Scotland back in the EU will only happen by building up sustained support, so that it becomes the democratic desire of the majority of people who live here.

‘That may be an unpalatable message in a culture that worships the false god of instant gratification.

‘But no number of hashtags on social media can substitute for the hard slog necessary to achieve such a fundamental aim as the dissolution of the Anglo-Scottish union.

‘And for that to happen, minds must be changed.’

That is not a message that Miss Sturgeon wants to hear, for she is the chief proponent of the instant gratification culture in her own party, the mindset that says independence is just around the corner, despite more than half of Scots opposing it.

The First Minister suffered yet another blow to her authority, this time from the opposite end of the nationalist spectrum – another former party adviser, Kirk Torrance, who headed the party’s digital campaign. Torrance, a supporter of Salmond’s Alba Party, excoriated Miss Sturgeon for her decision to refer the referendum question to the Supreme Court, and condemned her failure to exploit the 2021 Holyrood elections to gain a pro-independence ‘super majority’.

Most damaging of all the recent attacks, however, came from Mr MacAskill, who took no prisoners in a column filled with contempt for her: ‘Whatever possessed Sturgeon to pursue that strategy no one knows. But a cunning plan it wasn’t. Worse were the lies told by her and her acolytes.

‘A ‘‘no ifs, no buts’’ referendum was promised and patsies such as her Westminster group leader Ian Blackford every year assured us all that it was coming, next year was a certainty. Yet they knew that was fraudulent. So where do we go from here? Well, the SNP leadership sure haven’t got a clue.

‘But stifling internal democracy in Sturgeon’s New SNP has harmed the party’s very raison d’être. Those who stayed silent owe it to the movement to not just speak out, but take action.’

MacAskill may no longer be a

‘When the rot sets in, it sets in very quickly indeed’

member of the SNP but it would be foolish to dismiss him out of hand, having served as justice minister alongside Salmond and Miss Sturgeon herself. There are many in the SNP who don’t have the same hatred of Alba and Salmond that the First Minister does, and will be open to the kinds of arguments MacAskill makes.

In the days following the 2014 independence referendum, and in the aftermath of the SNP landslide at the 2015 general election, the SNP enjoyed an unparalleled period of dominance in Scotland.

They’ve swept all before them in subsequent elections, and even Miss Sturgeon’s harshest critics can hardly deny that her leadership has played a pivotal part in cementing that dominance.

Yet, as with so many institutions and empires, when the rot sets in, it sets in very quickly indeed.

The First Minister has gone from ‘towering’ to ‘floundering’ in a remarkably short period of time. Her internal enemies and critics are multiplying and the record of her government is coming under ever more critical scrutiny.

Things cannot last for much longer. Something’s got to give. And without a referendum into which activists and their leaders can pour their energies, the risk for Miss Sturgeon is that they will vent their frustrations in a new direction. At her.

When the history of the SNP comes to be written, this week will be seen as the beginning of the end of the Sturgeon era.

The only question is: how close are we to that end?