SNP members have been told to "grow up" by a former senior government minister as the party begins its first open leadership contest in almost 20 years.
Jeane Freeman, who served as health secretary until retiring from Holyrood in 2021, hit out at colleagues in the party engaged in "infighting" as the race to replace Nicola Sturgeon heats up.
Key figures within the party, such as former minister Marco Biagi, have hit out at Kate Forbes over her stance on abortion and same-sex marriage.
Forbes is widely expected to launch her leadership campaign in the coming days and is seen by many as a frontrunner in the race to Bute House.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Freeman said: "The first thing I’d say is to my colleagues in the SNP, and I’d say to them: could you grow up?
"It’s not about you, it’s about the job that you were elected to do or the job that your party asks you to do.
"You will convince nobody, you will persuade nobody, you will achieve nothing by taking lumps out of each other.
"There is a big difference between respectful argument and listening to what other people say and personal attacks and hyperbole.
"If we don’t know by now that a party that appears to be fighting among itself is a party that won’t get support, that doesn’t actually deserve it, then I don’t know what else we need to do to learn that lesson.
We see it all around us, we’ve seen it in some of the circumstances where we have secured electoral victory by not being like that.
"It is beyond my understanding why people are choosing to be so self-indulgent."
Freeman has not yet given her backing to any candidate in the election.
Forbes has faced questions over whether she could lead a socially liberal party like the SNP as she is an active member of the Free Church of Scotland.
Marco Biagi, an SNP councillor in Edinburgh and former MSP, said yesterday: "The only evidence I can see of Kate Forbes being a social conservative is her anti-abortion call at the Brian Souter event and her repeated refusal to say she supports equal marriage, such as on this podcast.
"For me, that is enough.
"I'm not going to assume she holds all the views of her church and try to tar her by association. Many religious people support LGBT rights. Many atheists don't.
"For me it is nothing to do with how anyone gets to the views, it is about those views that they actually hold.
"They are free to hold the views. I can deal with a big tent approach enough to accept someone holding those views in high office, if that office is mainly unrelated.""
He added: "I've just been through too much to now elect a leader for the country who, whatever their other strengths, can't even say they support LGBT people having this same basic right as they do."
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