Next week the great and the good of Scottish politics will gather at Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House for the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards 2024 in association with ScottishPower.
Among those hoping to take home a gong will be Audrey Nicoll, the SNP MSP for Aberdeen South and North Kincardine.
She has been nominated for her work leading Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee.
Their rigorous and exacting work dissecting the Scottish Government’s planned legal reforms has a lot to do with why some of those planned legal reforms are now not going ahead.
When you talk to her colleagues, you get the impression that the ex-copper is well respected, well-liked.
Which makes it surprising that Stephen Flynn is trying to oust her.
On Tuesday, the SNP Westminster leader confirmed he was seeking the nomination to be the party’s candidate in Nicoll’s seat.
Challenging Nicoll was, Flynn admitted to the Press and Journal, something that “didn’t fill him with any joy”.
Still, despite that, he’s going to do it.
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Meanwhile, Nicoll told the paper that while it “came as a surprise,” everyone in the party has always been “very clear about Stephen’s longer-term ambition.”
Nevertheless, the chutzpah of Flynn has stunned some of the SNP Holyrood group.
It’s not just that he’s trying to get rid of a colleague, but that he plans to hang on in Westminster while sitting as an MSP.
Just three years ago, the party criticised Douglas Ross for doing the same thing, saying “the days of dual mandates should be consigned to history.”
Flynn himself has been critical of double jobbers, writing in a letter to Rishi Sunak last year that “being elected as an MP is a privilege and must never be treated as anything less than a full-time job.”
Given that at least two other SNP MPs have their papers in for a Holyrood seat, maybe he just meant it should never be treated as anything less than a full-time job by people who aren’t in his party.
The decision has also picked open a still festering scab for the party. Ahead of the 2020 vote, the party’s ruling NEC implemented a new rule to make it harder for their politicians to hold dual mandates.
It meant that an MP picked to stand for Holyrood would need to quit their Westminster seat, close their office, make their staff redundant and trigger by-election.
It was widely seen as a ploy to stop Joanna Cherry heading to the Scottish Parliament.
There was some suggestion on Tuesday that the dual mandate rule was set at each election. It’s not that it would need to be rescinded to allow Flynn to stand, it would just need to not be reintroduced.
And that could be a problem for the ambitious Dundonian.
I’m told that some members of the NEC are set to submit a motion at the next meeting calling for a similar measure to be put in place again.
Whether that will be successful is another matter.
As one former NEC member told me yesterday, Flynn, though he may “be arrogant and cocky is still one of the best talents the SNP has.”
Can they really afford to lock him out of Holyrood?
