Yes, the parliamentary arithmetic would work for Kate Forbes, whether Kenny Farquharson likes it or not

Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson, aka "Jurassic Farq", has a really nasty piece in The Times which is ultimately a bigoted rant about why a committed member of a particular religious denomination he personally dislikes should never be allowed to hold high office, but which tarts itself up in progressive-sounding language about how our leaders must reflect the diversity of modern Scotland.  On that note, incidentally, wouldn't it be rather a good idea to at last have a First Minister who is a fluent Gaelic speaker?  Given the dire predictions that Gaelic could cease to be a fully-functioning community language within as little as a decade, isn't this the perfect moment to have in Kate Forbes a national leader who is authentically committed to taking the necessary steps to protect the language, because she embodies what stands to be lost if that doesn't happen?

Farquharson switches from bigotry to innumeracy with this section - 

"There is good reason for the “anyone but Kate” campaign gaining strength within the SNP this week. I am sure any parliamentary vote to install Forbes as first minister would lead to a number of abstentions from the SNP benches. For Forbes to win the prize she would need the Tories to abstain en masse.

SNP folk should ask themselves if this is how they really want to see their new leader take power."

He might as well just have "I don't understand the rules" tattooed on his forehead.  One of the oddities of the Scotland Act is that the votes of a majority of MSPs are not required to be elected First Minister.  A candidate simply needs to have more votes in the final ballot than the other remaining candidate.  That's why Alex Salmond was able to become First Minister in 2007 with the votes of just 49 of the 129 MSPs.  

In Kate Forbes' case, her opponent in the final ballot (if it even got that far) would be Douglas Ross, so there would be no question of Labour and the Greens playing silly buggers by actively voting against her at that stage.  In all probability, she would win by 63 votes to 31.  SNP MSPs would not abstain for exactly the same reason that Forbes and her backers did not abstain on Yousaf becoming FM.  Refusing to vote to sustain an SNP government is inconsistent with membership of the SNP parliamentary party, and anyone who went down that road would inevitably lose the whip.

But even assuming Farquharson is right that there are SNP MSPs ready and willing to throw their careers away to stop Forbes, her 32-vote cushion over Ross means there would need to be at least 32 SNP abstentions to stop her - more than half the entire parliamentary party.  Who precisely are these thirty-two martyrs, Kenny?

Once Forbes is actually in office, the first thing she would probably try to do is mend relations with the Greens, and she might have a chance of succeeding on a sort of "Nixon in China" basis - ie. any agreements with her would be so toughly-negotiated and businesslike that the Greens would trust her to stick to her word.  But even if the Greens continue to dislike her so much that they try to bring down the government she leads, they quite simply wouldn't have the numbers to do that.  Kate Forbes and Ash Regan are old friends, and it thus seems inconceivable that Alba would ever help bring down a Forbes-led government.  At worst, then, a confidence vote would result in a 64-64 tie, with the Presiding Officer voting to save the government with her casting vote in line with convention.

Again, SNP MSPs cannot abstain or vote against the government on a confidence vote without effectively excluding themselves from the party.  So what it really boils down to is whether you think SNP MSPs will defect outright to the Greens.  And while that's not totally impossible, defections among MSPs are rare enough that I'd want specifics about who these people actually are before taking the idea remotely seriously.

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