Angus Robertson, the Scottish National party’s leader at Westminster, has emerged as the early favourite to become the party’s next deputy leader after confirming he would contest the post on Twitter.
Robertson immediately won a range of endorsements from prominent figures in the SNP, including the former Scottish agriculture secretary Richard Lochhead and Joanna Cherry QC, its Commons justice spokeswoman.
The post of party deputy leader became vacant after Stewart Hosie, the MP for Dundee East, resigned after announcing in May he had separated from his wife, the Scottish government minister Shona Robison, after his affair with a journalist was revealed.
The new deputy leader is expected to play a leading role in any fresh independence referendum, but Robertson, a fluent German speaker, said on Twitter that he was running because there was a “big job to protect Scotland’s place in Europe”.
Big job to protect Scotland's place in Europe, which is why I am running for the deputy leadership of @theSNP
— Angus Robertson (@AngusRobertson) July 3, 2016
He told the Sunday Herald his party had “a huge responsibility to protect Scotland in Europe. Since the EU referendum result, many colleagues from Holyrood, Westminster and the SNP grassroots have asked me to run for the deputy leadership”.
Other candidates being touted include the former Scottish Labour assistant general secretary Tommy Sheppard, who is now the SNP MP for Edinburgh East, and Alyn Smith, the MEP who was given a standing ovation in the European parliament last week after his powerful appeal for support to protect Scotland’s ties with the EU.
Both men are reported to have been asked by supporters to stand. The SNP said on Sunday that so far no formal nominations had been received. Candidates need 100 members from at least 20 different branches by 5 August to endorse their candidacy.
The result, which will be decided in a ballot of the SNP’s 116,000 members, will be announced at the party conference in October.
Robertson, who was appointed Westminster leader in 2007 when the SNP had only six seats compared to the 56 it won last year, is on the pragmatic, gradualist wing of the party, and has historically been a very close ally of the former SNP leader Alex Salmond.
As the SNP’s defence spokesman, Robertson orchestrated the party’s controversial switch in policy to accept Nato membership in 2013 as it prepared for the 2014 independence referendum. That change, ending decades of opposition to the nuclear-armed defence alliance, led to three MSPs resigning.
He told the Sunday Herald: “After nearly a decade’s experience as Westminster SNP leader and as campaign director who has helped deliver national SNP election victories, I think I have the range of experience to fulfil this important role.”
Earlier the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson, said the UK government should not block a potential second Scottish independence referendum, although she would argue against holding one.
Davidson said she believed talk of a second referendum was “further destabilising” in the wake of the Brexit vote and that Nicola Sturgeon had acted prematurely in discussing the prospect of one.
The SNP manifesto for the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election said a “significant and a material change” of the circumstances in which Scotland voted against independence in 2014 could trigger a second referendum.
On the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Davidson was asked about the prospect of a second referendum.
She said: “I have never said it should be denied. I didn’t say it the last time either.
“But I believe it’s so premature for the first minister, within three and a half hours of votes being counted last Friday morning, standing up in Bute House and saying she was asking government officials to draw up the necessary legislation for a second independence referendum.
“We don’t know what we’d be voting on because there isn’t an offer to the UK government from the EU. I think it’s further destabilising in a period of instability already and I think it ill-becomes her.
“We don’t know what the options are for Scotland and it’s incredibly premature for the first minister to go down this road.”
