‘Never say never’: Her bid to replace Nicola Sturgeon failed but Kate Forbes may yet get another shot

It is a soft summer’s day in the Highlands as locals and the odd tourist hop in and out of the showers moistening the quiet little town of Dingwall, northwest of Inverness.

In her constituency office, sandwiched between a bookies and a derelict pub on the main street, Kate Forbes, a member of Scotland’s parliament, ponders what might have been. Her eyes narrow as she thinks back upon the pressures she faced earlier this year. Politics can be a brutal business.

When the talismanic Nicola Sturgeon quit as Scotland’s first minister in February, Forbes thought her moment had come. The Cambridge-educated 33-year-old, then finance secretary, was favourite to replace Sturgeon as leader of the Scottish National Party from the moment she declared her candidacy at 11am on a Monday.

By teatime the same day, her campaign lay in tatters. Forbes, a deeply religious member of the Calvinist, evangelical Free Church of Scotland, had spent the day giving a series of brutally honest but politically ruinous interviews in which she spoke against liberal totems such as same-sex marriage, gender self-identification and premarital sex.

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Many of her political supporters deserted her amid a media onslaught. She rallied against the tempest and fought on, turning the contest into a real scrap. In truth, however, her campaign never fully recovered.

Still, she ran it close, earning 48 per cent of member votes against 52 per cent for Humza Yousaf, Sturgeon’s preferred successor who became first minister by promising continuity from the old regime. Yet, it is Sturgeon’s political legacy, and Yousaf’s inheritance, that now lie in tatters following her subsequent arrest in a financial scandal that has roiled the SNP.

There is a school of thought among some seasoned observers of British politics, such as broadcaster Iain Dale, that Forbes would have easily vanquished Yousaf if she had given more deftly political, and less transparent, answers to those early questions about her religious views.

“Hmmm, I don’t think it is as clean cut as that,” she says, echoing what she told Dale this week at an Edinburgh Fringe event. But what if it is? If so, Forbes gave up the leadership of Scotland on the point of principle that she would not shield her views, no matter how out of step they might be with some SNP members, in order to gain votes.

Yet, clean cuts often heal the best. This week, Forbes agreed she may have “dodged a bullet” by losing out to Yousaf last time round. It is he who must now deal with the messy fallout from the financial scandal swirling around his old mentor and the SNP’s steep drop in the polls that could cost it half its Westminster seats at next year’s election.

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“It’s been pretty tough [dealing with the SNP’s travails]. Fair play to Humza Yousaf. I think it would have been difficult for anybody,” she says. “It’s difficult to set out your vision when you’re trying to manage these extraordinarily challenging situations, which you’re not in control of. [But] that’s not to say that I wouldn’t have given it my best shot had I won.”

When asked if she would go for the leadership again if it was available, Forbes, at first, says she doesn’t think she wants to. Eventually, though, she resorts to a “never say never” defence mode. Her coy stance ought to fool few. No matter what they say, most politicians, including Forbes, are hard wired to make a grab for the top job whenever it becomes a realistic possibility.

Surely she’ll go again. She seems too young not to. Yousaf might not last more than a couple of years if he struggles to right the SNP’s listing ship. In the meantime, she revels in her extra family time following the end of her stint as a minister – she turned down a lesser ministerial role in Yousaf’s cabinet. It also gives her time to focus on her political home patch.

“In the Highlands, people want a Highlander voice. They feel their rural concerns are not best represented by an urban elite. Fault lines in the Highlands are different from those in [other] Scottish politics. London and Edinburgh can sometimes feel equally far away. Even Inverness can feel far away for some of my constituents.”

Her constituency of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch stretches coast to coast across the middle of the Highlands. It is mostly rural and small town, with just a couple of larger urban centres such as Fort William and Dingwall, Forbes’s hometown.

The centre of Dingwall is quite handsome but it has a slew of empty shops. The Edinburgh Woollen Mills in the town is closed, as is the Commercial Bar next to Forbes’s office and a smattering of other outlets along its main drag.

She says this is partly because wages stagnated in the wider area in recent years and the economy grew slower than elsewhere, as the easing of recruitment for the North Sea oil and gas industry kicked in. Ironically, the Conservative party’s recent policy pivot to “max out” the area’s hydrocarbon reserves would probably benefit Forbes’s constituency, an SNP stronghold, in the short term at least. She has one of the largest electoral majorities in Scotland.

Many of Forbes’s policy preferences – a focus on economic growth and the easing off on the pace of the roll-out of certain green measures, such as a plan to ban gas boilers – make her more popular with centrists and right wingers than some of her other SNP colleagues.

“I know for a fact that neither Labour nor the Conservative party wanted me to be elected [as leader] because I was a much greater threat to their [hegemony with their own] voters. You see that in public polling [which showed she was more able to reach across party lines than Yousaf].”

Independence remains the core of the SNP’s being, however. Forbes believes the party should spend less time fighting with Westminster over how to get another independence referendum and more time building up Scotland’s economy and trying to win reluctant No voters over to the Yes side.

“Independence is not far [away] if we find a better way of communicating with and respecting No voters. There is a lot more support for independence out there than we are told, if we would only realise that we have common cause with all people who want to see Scotland flourish,” she says.

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“Rather than alienating No voters or just telling them they are wrong, we need to work on building the centre ground and find those who are there to be persuaded. If you lose your listeners by disrespecting or alienating them before you get a hearing, you don’t have any hope.”

While she wants to reach out more to No voters, it seems she is less enamoured about playing house with the Scottish Greens, who have a partnership arrangement, the Bute House Agreement, to support the SNP in government.

Some in the SNP want the deal reopened amid perceptions its policies favoured by the Greens are damaging the SNP electorally. “I don’t have any problem with the principle of co-operation with the Greens. It’s about the substance,” Forbes says.

Forbes wants the Bute House agreement debated and put to SNP members again at the party’s upcoming annual conference in Aberdeen – in effect, she wants a renegotiation. There is nothing wrong with “checking in” with party members on the deal, she says. “The Greens check in with their members.”

There is believed to be some lingering resentment in Forbes’s camp towards the Greens, who threatened to walk from the government partnership during the leadership contest if she became leader. Forbes isn’t giving any hint of it today, however.

About 100m down the road from her constituency office is Dingwall’s Free Church, where Forbes is a leading member. Arguably, her faith, or her determination to be true to it while in government, cost her Scotland’s top job.

Forbes feels that issues such as religious faith are no longer handled well in debates “in the public square” of society.

“We now live in a culture where if I don’t like your views, I hate you. And the only way I can win the argument is to cancel you or shut you down. People are fearful of stating their views,” she says.

“There is a perception that people of faith are biased and everybody else is neutral. But, in fact, everybody approaches life and politics with a philosophical moral framework. Nobody is neutral. If we can start by accepting that, then we can properly scrutinise others’ views.

“If politicians were more open about this, you’d get proper scrutiny. But if politicians only say that which is palatable, popular or fashionable, then you never get full scrutiny.”

She says she was heartened by a “backlash to the backlash” she received during the leadership contest, which made her more determined to be open about her religious beliefs. “I get that I have minority views. I absolutely get it.”

The SNP is seen by many as being in crisis but Forbes insists it has greater unity and solidity than it is given credit for in English media. We shall see. If the polls are anything to go by, the party is in for a rough time in next year’s Westminster elections.

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Forbes says she is not averse to running for a Westminster seat one day herself but the real power in Scottish politics lies in its devolved parliament in Edinburgh. She admits she is tempted by the prospect of being the leader who could deliver Scottish independence in future.

“But just to be the one who tries is not enough. It has to be the right time for you and for the country.”