Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon on Monday attempted to play down the crisis engulfing her Scottish National party’s election of a new leader, saying the contest was proving difficult but “healthy”.
The three candidates to replace Sturgeon have fiercely criticised each other’s records. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the SNP’s long-serving chief executive, resigned on Saturday after the party was forced to admit it had 30,000 fewer members than claimed at the start of the race.
Sturgeon, who has been first minister since 2014, admitted the SNP’s first contested leadership election in two decades was proving “challenging and difficult”, but said it was necessary to embrace change and the party should be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bath water”.
“It’s an unusual process for the SNP, but it’s essential and it’s healthy,” she told an audience at the Royal Society of Arts in London. “It will, I think, lead to a stronger position as we come out of it.”
Asked by the BBC on Sunday if the pro-independence SNP was in turmoil following the resignation of Murrell, party president and interim chief executive Michael Russell said: “It’s fair to say that there is a tremendous mess and we have to clean it up.”
However, Sturgeon suggested on Monday that Russell had been misquoted.
“He didn’t say the SNP was a mess, he said the narrative around the leadership election had become messy.”
Many in the SNP have been dismayed by the party divisions exposed during the leadership election, which is due to reach a conclusion on March 27.
Former community minister Ash Regan, the candidate regarded as the rank outsider in the race, has claimed the SNP had “lost its way”.
Kate Forbes, the finance secretary and another candidate, has criticised the record of Sturgeon’s government, saying “more of the same” would be “an acceptance of mediocrity”.
Humza Yousaf, health secretary and the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed Sturgeon, has cast himself as the continuity candidate but also said the SNP headquarters must be reformed to become more inclusive.
Some in the SNP have blamed Sturgeon and Murrell for what they consider a top-down approach to party management involving a lack of transparency and accountability.
After all three candidates joined calls for the SNP to reverse its refusal to release details of the current size of its membership, the party said on Thursday that 72,186 people were eligible to take part in the leadership vote.
The SNP claimed at the start of the contest it still had close to the 104,000 members it had reported at the end of 2021.
The party also initially denied a report last month in Scotland’s Sunday Mail that it had lost 30,000 members.
Sturgeon acknowledged that the SNP had “mishandled that situation”, but insisted the party had been seeking to answer a specific question about why it had lost members.
“These things are all opportunities to learn and to reflect,” she told ITV’s Loose Women, making no mention of the original claim that party membership was close to its 2021 level.
Regan, who has repeatedly raised doubts about the integrity of the leadership election process, said on Monday that SNP members who had already cast their votes should be allowed to change them because of events over the weekend.
Russell rejected Regan’s request, saying it would be “massively disruptive and confusing” for members to be able to cast their vote again, and doing so would expose the process to hacking attempts.
