Kate Forbes’s enduring narrative surrounding her 2023 Scottish National Party leadership campaign is a masterclass in political misdirection. The conventional wisdom, regurgitated across countless media profiles, is straightforward: a brilliant, rising star spoke her authentic truth on gay marriage, suffered an immediate media crucifixion, and watched a "slam dunk" victory vanish overnight. It is a neat, tragic story about faith, modern intolerance, and what happens when raw honesty collides with a hyper-progressive political machine.
It is also completely wrong.
The lazy consensus loves a martyr. It allows commentators to moan about the death of free speech while letting political strategists off the hook for basic operational incompetence. The reality of that campaign was not a sudden, unpredictable clash of values. It was a failure of rudimentary political risk management, a fundamental misunderstanding of the modern electorate, and a strategic blunder that any serious campaign operator should have spotted a mile away. Forbes did not lose because she was honest. She lost because her campaign treated political reality as an afterthought.
The Illusion of the Certain Victory
Let us dismantle the premise of the "slam dunk" candidacy. In politics, a frontrunner status before the first ballot is cast is an incredibly fragile thing. I have watched campaigns collapse under the weight of their own inevitability because they confused early name recognition with locked-in voter loyalty.
Before Forbes even opened her mouth about her religious beliefs, her path to leadership was fraught. The SNP was already fracturing under the weight of Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden departure and a deepening policy crisis over gender recognition reform. The party was not a monolith waiting to crown a successor; it was a powder keg looking for a match.
To claim that victory was guaranteed right up until the moment of her media rounds is to ignore the structural fault lines within the party membership. A candidate's personal convictions are never a surprise to their inner circle. If a campaign is blindsided by its own candidate's core beliefs during week one of a national media blitz, that is not a tragedy of faith—it is a catastrophic failure of vetting and communication strategy.
The Authenticity Trap
Modern political commentary is obsessed with "authenticity." Voters supposedly crave raw, unscripted leaders who say what they mean. This is a lie. Voters want the appearance of authenticity, carefully curated to match their existing biases.
When a politician reveals a view that directly contradicts the core identity of their party's base, the "authentic" label ceases to be an asset. It becomes a liability. The SNP’s modern brand is built on a specific flavor of civic nationalism heavily intertwined with socially progressive values. Expecting the membership to simply wave through a leader whose views run counter to that brand—regardless of how politely those views are expressed—is political naivety of the highest order.
Consider the mechanics of political capital. Every leader starts with a finite bank account of trust. You can spend that capital pushing controversial economic reforms or radical structural changes. But when you spend your entire opening treasury defending personal theological positions that do not advance the party's central mission of independence, you are bankrupt before you even take office.
The Math of Modern Electability
Political commentators love to treat these moments as philosophical debates about religious freedom in public life. Let us look at the cold, hard numbers instead.
Elections are won on broad coalitions. To win a national vote, a party leader must appeal to the center-ground voters who decide marginal seats. In Scotland, public opinion on social issues has shifted decisively over the last two decades. Data from the Scottish Social Attitudes survey shows a steady, decades-long rise in acceptance of equal marriage and LGBT rights across almost every demographic.
A leader who publicly states they would have voted against equal marriage is not just making a moral statement; they are placing a massive electoral anchor around the neck of their party. Opponents do not need to attack your economic policy or your record on public services; they just need to replay those interview clips on a loop during a general election. The debate was never about whether a person of faith can lead; it was about whether a party desperate to maintain power could afford the electoral tax that specific faith position incurred.
Strategic Incompetence is Not a Virtue
Imagine a scenario where a corporate CEO goes on a media tour to launch a new product, but spends the first three days telling reporters that they personally dislike the company’s core customer base. The board would fire them by Tuesday afternoon. No one would call them a martyr for corporate honesty; they would be called incompetent.
The job of a political leader is to build majorities, manage coalitions, and navigate a hostile media environment. If a candidate cannot handle predictable, standard-fare questions about their well-known personal beliefs without triggering a massive internal party revolt, they lack the basic tactical skills required for the high-stakes theater of modern governance.
The media did not set a trap for Kate Forbes. They asked the most obvious, baseline questions that any political advisor could have anticipated months in advance. The fact that the campaign team allowed her to walk into those interviews without a robust, ironclad communication strategy that protected her integrity while reassuring the party base is the real story. It wasn't ideological intolerance that derailed the campaign; it was amateur hour in the strategy room.
Stop blaming the culture wars for a textbook lesson in bad political engineering. If you want to win the highest office in the land, you have to play the game on the field that actually exists, not the one you wish existed.
