Nicola Sturgeon is chiefly to blame for the damage to the SNP

Anyone who has truly observed how the SNP has been conducting its internal affairs will know that there would soon come a day when scores would have to be settled and bad blood allowed to bubble forth before being expunged. As Michael Corleone told his perfidious brother-in-law Carlo in The Godfather: “Barzini is dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia. Moe Greene. Stracci. Cuneo. Today, I settled all family business, so don’t tell me that you’re innocent. Admit what you did.”

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It fulfilled the prophecy of Clemenza, the Corleone family’s genial hitman, earlier in the movie: “These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood.” In Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP the bad blood has been festering for several years and sooner or later all family business would have to be settled one way or another. If it hadn’t occurred during the leadership contest it would have happened eventually.

This party has been at war with itself ever since Nicola Sturgeon took the reins. She and her most loyal glove-puppets point to eight electoral successes as proof that all has been well. Yet, such has been the weakness of the opposition at Holyrood during this time that, to paraphrase the old apercu about Labour’s former dominance in Scotland, a monkey in a yellow rosette would have prevailed in many constituencies.

It’s become startlingly obvious since 2017 that the party leadership had begun using “independence” as a vote-winning tool at elections. Its professional wing would all be instructed to tweet furiously about independence in the days before an election.

And then, when the vote was safely in the bag and the coast was clear they could get back to doing what they do best: virtue-signalling about “progressiveness” and acting like chocolate soldiers as they waved their fists from a safe distance about other countries’ wars.

Any lone wolves who broke from the pack by expressing a desire to find a workable Plan B were howled down before being silenced. The message was clear to anyone questioning the strategy of central office: if you want a future in this party then keep your mouth shut.

When Kate Forbes trashed Humza Yousaf’s dismal record in government across three different cabinet postings, she was merely reflecting a discontent that had been simmering inside the party and in the country at large for several years.

If she is to become leader, her best chance of persuading soft No voters of the case for independence starts with being honest about the SNP’s failures. And not by treating the electorate as mugs and pretending they were any good at reducing health inequality or bridging the mortality gap that exists between Scotland’s most affluent and disadvantaged communities.

Party loyalty was tested and measured in a series of initiatives designed to deflect from its lack of commitment to addressing the issues that really matter in the lives of most Scots. Thus, we had the utterly fatuous Named Person proposals followed by the spanking debate and minimum alcohol pricing. This was followed by the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act and the Hate Crime legislation (the most egregious failure of Mr Yousaf’s error-strewn career).

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These were all flagged up as being consistent with a “progressive” agenda. But they were about as progressive as Genghis Khan. Real people know what real progressiveness looks like and it’s a million miles away from hectoring working-class communities about their family lives and their use of language.

The middle-class commentariat wagging their fingers at the rest of us over soy lattes in Giffnock and G12 reinforced the notion that Scotland’s political elites were merely talking to themselves in their exclusive, platinum-card lounges. “I’m having a pronoun-naming party next Sunday. Would you like to come along? Brenda the rubber fetish drag artist is entertaining the kids. And by the way: did you see how many likes I got on Twitter for my alfalfa and sweet potato fricassee?”

Those within the party who rejected the progressive lie gradually found themselves isolated. The National Executive Committee was hollowed out by bad actors and then became the main instrument of the party politburo for dealing with insurgents. It began acting like an Inquisition, brutally marginalising and intimidating those who dared to question the groupthink.

So out of touch were they with public opinion and the views of their own rank-and-file members that they sought to strong-arm their calamitous GRR legislation through Holyrood. In the process they rejected all reasonable compromises that would have maintained the dignity of those authentically seeking to change their gender while protecting women’s sex-based rights.

They arrogantly ignored all the warnings about what might happen when violent men sought to exploit this legislation and then paid the price when it was revealed that rapists were being set loose in women’s prisons. This starkly epitomised what their “progressiveness” was all about: risking the safety of vulnerable, working-class women for a self-indulgent, middle-class caprice.

This is when the mask slipped and the public began asking questions about how a party elected to govern in the interests of all the people had been captured by an elect who had detached themselves from reality. The dramatic dip in support for the SNP and independence in general has its roots in this. The “brutality” of the leadership contest is merely the natural consequence of what some of us knew would transpire once this was held up to the light.

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In truth, there’s little about it that’s been brutal at all, except perhaps the attempts by the Yousaf camp to knock Kate Forbes out of the contest, aided by their media lickspittles. This was of a piece though with the way that this party has been treating some of its female members for many years.

If Mr Yousaf’s camp think their man was subject to cruel and unusual treatment by Ms Forbes they should consider what might happen to him over the course of a gruelling referendum campaign. The British establishment don’t take prisoners and are already relishing the prospect of a serial and spineless failure in Bute House.

Which is presumably why Mr Yousaf and his increasingly frantic support base of Westminster and Holyrood wage thieves don’t want one any time soon.