CONTENDERS to replace Nicola Sturgeon must be able to answer tough questions on the SNP’s independence strategy and gender reforms immediately, MSPs have said.

MSPs told the Herald they wanted to know how candidates would deal with the constitutional bind the party finds itself in as well as the row over the stymied Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

The Holyrood GRR Bill was passed at Christmas despite widepspread public opposition, and was conflated in the New Year with a separate row over transgender prisoners. 

The Bill was intended to simplify and speed up the process for a person obtaining a gender recognition ceritificate, dropping a medical diagnosis in favour of self-identification.

It was vetoed by the Westminster government last month with a “Section 35 order” because of fears of a clash with UK-wide equality law.

Ms Sturgeon called it a “full-frontal attack” on the Scottish Parliament, and said it was inevitable that it would be the subject of a legal challenge.

The Scottish Government has until mid-April to launch a judicial review of the S35 order at the Court of Session.

As that is likely to be after the SNP leadership contest, the winner would have to decide whether to take legal action, redo the Bill, or accept the veto.

Even if Ms Sturgeon had already initiated the legal action, the new FM would have to decide whether to pursue it to its conclusion, possibly as far as the UK Supreme Court.

One MSP said: “If someone phoned me, I’d be saying, How will you deal with the GRR, how will you deal with the tie-up with the Greens, how will you deal with the de facto referendum, what’s your strategy going to be? 

“Somebody is going to have to come up with a sensible approach to GRR.

“If it had lit a fire under the wider movement - how dare Westminster do this with Section 35! - there may have been an argument for [going to court], but there’s quite clearly not [been that reaction]. The whole issue has been decisive.

"Any sensible candidate will have to take a line that helps people understand that wasn’t the best of us.”

Another MSP said the mood in the party was one of “shock” because, while Alex Salmond’s exit had been foreseeable in 2014 and Ms Sturgeon had been waiting in the wings, her own resignation had been unexpected and there was no reassuring successor.

They said any candidate needed to have their own independence strategy, otherwise the party - possibly at the special conference which may happen next month - would frame it for them.

“If I wanted to be a candidate, I would not want to go into the race without being able to design the independence strategy to go forward. Effectively you would be going in with a straitjacket. It just doesn’t make sense.” 

The GRR Section 35 decision could prove particularly controversial for finance secretary Kate Forbes.

A devout Christian, the Skye MSP  was wary of some of the Bill’s aims.

In 2019, she was one of 15 SNP MSPs, MPs and councillors who signed a letter warning her Government not to rush gender reform legislation.

“Changing the definition of male and female is a matter of profound significance. It is not something we should rush,” she and the others said.

However, although many of the other MSPs voted against the Bill, and one minister resigned, Ms Forbes was never put on the spot as she missed the key votes while on maternity leave.

Were she to accept the Westminster veto it could upset both her own party and her Green partners in Government.

Susan Smith, spokeswoman for the For Women Scotland group, which has challenged the Scottish Government over its gender reforms, urged the next first minister to avoid a court battle.

They said: “Our view is that the legislation was always hopelessly flawed and really they have to go back and start again. I think that if they pursue a judicial review of the Section 35 order that they will lose. 

"So whoever comes next will have to decide whether this is a useful use of taxpayers’ money, and it’s not. 

"The successor could spare them-selves a lot of grief by not pursuing it. It does rather feel as if she [Sturgeon] is leaving other people to clear up a mess that she’s created on this front.”

Ms Forbes has yet to say if she will stand, but in a Christian podcast last year she spoke of feeling a “compulsion to duty” that suggests she will.

She told the Life Issues podcast: “Jesus did perhaps the most unpleasant thing in dying for sinners, and that sense of duty therefore is because I know I don’t contribute anything to my own righteousness.  

"And yet I’ve been given the gift of righteousness and salvation, so you jolly well better use that gift for the good of others in the way that you too have received goodness that you didn’t deserve.”