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.
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. ]
“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.”
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.
“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.“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.
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.
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