The greatest trick an ideologue can ever pull off is convincing people they are not, in fact, an ideologue. But Nicola Sturgeon was just as much an ideologue as her predecessor. In some ways, indeed, her convictions eclipsed Alex Salmond’s.

The country is cleft in two and for all that Sturgeon may now deplore this polarisation she played an outsize part in producing it

Whereas he did not join the SNP until he was an undergraduate at St Andrews university, Sturgeon signed up for the national cause while still a teenager.