Scottish nationalist leader John Swinney suffered a blow on Friday when two MSPs announced they would not be supporting him in the forthcoming ballot.

Adam Ingram claimed he would vote for challenger Dr Bill Wilson at next week's SNP conference in Inverness, while Bruce McFee said he would abstain.

Both have accused Swinney of watering down the party's commitment to independence for Scotland.

"I really can no longer endorse the direction that the leadership is taking," said McFee.

"Under John Swinney's leadership, we're now told that the referendum would be in year two or year three of the SNP forming a government in Edinburgh.

"What is very clear is that this policy has been used by the leadership as a way of watering down the independence message, to say to people, 'you can vote SNP without believing a word we say about independence'.

"Let's be quite clear about this. The leadership have used this policy for a reason that the party never intended and that was to make it an independence-like policy so that they could back-pedal the independence policy and as a nationalist I fundamentally disagree with that."

Ingram agreed. "We spent far too much time at Scottish parliamentary elections telling people that voting SNP was not a vote for independence in terms of having a referendum," he told Scottish Television.

As a result, the party "totally confused our supporters in particular, and we lost a lot of our core voters", he argued.

The party lost eight seats in elections to the Holyrood parliament earlier this year.

However Lothians MSP Fiona Hyslop claimed that next week's poll could mirror that in 2000, when Swinney beat Alex Neil to succeed Alex Salmond as SNP leader.