One bit of comfort that the Conservatives can take from the current battle to succeed Nicola Sturgeon is that they are not alone in finding public leadership contests a hugely destructive experience.
In the first televised hustings on Tuesday night the three contenders for the leadership of the Scottish National Party – Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes, and Ash Regan – tore strips out of each other.
The former two seem to be the ones actually contending for first place and pulled no punches. Yousaf accused his rival of threatening to drag the Nationalists to the right and alienate current Yes voters; Forbes denounced the Scottish Government (in which she serves!”) as “mediocre”, and savaged her opponents’ record in a succession of ministerial posts.
Both have a point. As we noted when Forbes’ religion first became an issue (which for some reason it had not been in all her years on the SNP front bench), it isn’t obvious that for all her talents she is the candidate best placed to hold on to the new coalition the party has forged under Sturgeon in the aftermath of 2014.
Meanwhile Yousaf’s ministerial reputation is indeed not very good – although this does not set him apart from many of his colleagues except that he is standing for the leadership and they aren’t.
A new focus on actually governing Scotland might be a very positive development, but there’s a reason Sturgeon has worked so hard to keep her voters focused on independence, and Forbes might rue inviting renewed scrutiny on the Scottish Government’s actual record (especially as she says she’ll find a place for Yousaf in her cabinet).
On independence, Regan is the hardliner candidate, pledging that any SNP victory in an election will be a mandate for negotiating independence.
This, an even Zoomier version of Sturgeon’s last-chance-saloon idea of using the next general election as a de facto referendum, is not popular with the Nationalist higher-ups, because it presents an enormous downside risk – lose and you have, by your own admission, lost twice – with very little upside, as no British government is going to negotiate on that basis and it would alienate international opinion.
(Just imagine asking the Spanish to endorse the idea that victory in a devolved election is a mandate for breaking up a state.)
Yet her presence in the race, even more than the nature of the contest, means that her rivals also need answers on independence that satisfy that activist core. Yousaf has pledged that he will be “first activist” for separation, a depressing if honest signal that he would share his predecessors priorities, but is vague on the specifics.
Forbes is not. She says that she will somehow force Westminster to grant Holyrood the power to hold another legally-binding referendum within 90 days of taking office as First Minister. Exactly how she would do this, she can’t say.
Beyond that, her prospectus is more realistic: a ten-year plan for delivering independence, focused on winning over No voters and accepting that 50-per-cent-plus-one is not an acceptable threshold for delivering such dramatic change.
Yet if she failed to hit her first self-imposed deadline – and she would – could she really persuade her restive troops to sign on for another decade-long tour of duty?
Already, it is difficult to see the phalanx-like discipline which has been the SNP’s secret weapon re-establishing itself in the wake of this contest. It isn’t impossible – if Alex Salmond first imposed that culture, someone else can do it – but it doesn’t seem likely.
Outwith the party hierarchy, the sprawling, imperial voter coalition the SNP assembled after 2014 is united by little save independence. The policy divisions so visible between the leadership candidates reflect the real state of SNP Scotland, a land that compasses rightists and leftists, social liberals and conservatives, Central Belt and Highlands.
To keep that show on the road, Sturgeon had to maintain the illusion that immanentization of the eschaton (to borrow language with which Forbes might be familiar) was just around the corner. Every year, a new push for independence; every year, another National headline declaring that the blessed day was nigh.
It worked, for a while. But despite some of the most favourable political conditions imaginable – Brexit, Boris, a pandemic that put her front and centre every day – even so skilled a communicator as the First Minister couldn’t move the dial on independence.
The crucial question is whether her latter-day reversion to such zoomer tactics as the de facto referendum reflected an understanding that this strategy was running out of road, or merely the fear that she was running out of time.
If the latter, a change of the guard might well grant Forbes or Yousaf a bit of breathing space. If the former, they could find themselves trapped between the Scylla of a doomed and self-harming kamikaze run at independence and the Charybdis of their coalition starting to disintegrate.
Unionists should be careful not to overstate the likelihood of the latter: the SNP remain the hegemonic power in Scottish politics and will likely remain so for some time yet.
But the same dynamic that saw them sweep Scotland’s Westminster seats could see them swept out just as brutally, in the right conditions, if their support falls below the all-conquering threshold.
Either way, the right approach from Westminster will not change much.
It is not, as some mischaracterise so-called muscular unionism, to keep picking fights for the sake of it: ministers should generally play nice and give the SNP the time and space to fail.
But they should not allow this to mean passing up on opportunities to win substantive, structural victories and recapture strategic terrain. From renationalising the British Transport Police to establishing a truly national census, there are prizes to be wrested from a weakened SNP.