John Swinney could face a leadership contest before he becomes Scottish National party leader after an activist said he expected to win enough nominations to stand. Graeme McCormick, a well-known party activist who stood to become SNP president in 2023, claimed he would gather the 100 signatures needed from 20 different party branches to mount a challenge for the leadership. His supporters argue it would be undemocratic for the party’s leader to win an unopposed coronation and insist that Swinney ought to face a contest. If one does take place, Swinney will not be appointed as first minister until late May. One of McCormick’s backers, Iain Lawson, posted on X on Sunday that he had already obtained the 100 signatures required and was planning to hand them in to the SNP “in person”. Lawson also attacked Swinney for criticising the move, and in another post accused Swinney of being entitled and “raging” that an ordinary member was challenging him. “So Graeme McCormick has succeeded in getting the nominations he needed. Disappointed that JS [Swinney] has already had a dig at him before nominations even close for daring to challenge him. He is to give ordinary members the chance to question the new leader. New idea?” McCormick, some of whose allies want the Scottish government to mount a second independence referendum without Westminster’s approval, won applause from hardliners when he denounced the SNP’s caution as “flatulence in a trance” during last year’s party conference.
Nominations to succeed Humza Yousaf as SNP leader close at noon on Monday. If another candidate crosses the nominations threshold and forces a contest, Yousaf is expected to remain in post and as Scotland’s first minister until a winner is declared. McCormick was very confident he would gather the signatures before the deadline after canvassing for support at an independence rally in Glasgow organised by All Under One Banner, the Sunday Herald newspaper reported. Swinney, who has been expecting to be confirmed as the new SNP leader on Monday afternoon and be voted in as first minister this week, warned on Sunday that a contest would delay his efforts to rebuild the party and put its deep divisions on public display. “I think it would be better if we just got on with things, that we started the rebuilding of the SNP and its political strength,” he told BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show. “We had a lot of strains around a couple of issues in parliament and I think we’ve just had a rough couple of years. “[The] SNP has not looked cohesive; the SNP has not looked together. The central point of my message is we’ve got to get ourselves together.” An unopposed coronation would not be the SNP’s first: Nicola Sturgeon succeeded Alex Salmond in November 2014 without a contest. Swinney’s call for SNP members to realise the urgency of the need to restore public confidence in the party was underlined by a poll by Norstat for Sunday Times Scotland, which said support for the party in a Westminster election had slumped to 29%. The poll, the first to be carried out since Yousaf suddenly quit last week, put Labour on 34% and the Scottish Conservatives on 16%. Those figures suggest the SNP could lose 28 Westminster seats, a fall from 43 MPs at present to 15. Labour, which has only two Scottish seats, would win 28.