For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers.

Gloating in such a manner is odious and juvenile and so I simply shook my head sadly and even shed a tear when I heard that the party’s treasurer, Colin Beattie, had been arrested. In fact I spent most of the day beneath a shroud of tears, having learned that the mega campervan parked outside Peter Murrell’s mum’s house had been bought for ‘campaigning purposes’ during the pandemic – and then read the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s Putinish lecture to members of the SNP’s National Executive Committee who had dared to question the state of the party’s finances.

The tears failed to cease when the party’s inept new leader, Humza Yousaf, insisted that there was no reason for Sturgeon to resign her seat, because we have ‘moved past the time’ when wives can be held responsible for the actions of their spouses. Yousaf, I think, is an idiot – but then so too are the Scottish police if they continue to display a complete lack of curiosity about what little Ma Sturgeon knew and when. Are we really to believe she had not the slightest idea anything whatsoever untoward was taking place? That she did not know about the existence of the campervan, or how it had been bought, or why it spent so long at her mum-in-law’s house?

Perhaps she didn’t – but one way or another, don’t the rozzers think it might be interesting to find out, by talking to her for a bit? Apparently not. Such is the sway Sturgeon held over that benighted country that while the coppers feel they have a right to peer closely at her barbecue, they cannot quite bring themselves to have a word with her directly. It is most odd.

I was a little wary of writing about the misfortunes befalling Scotchland because whenever I do some SNP halfwits who adhere to the trendy new discipline of Critical Scotch Theory get themselves terribly worked up and demand that I am arrested for hate crimes. But needs must. It seems perfectly clear from south of the border that the leadership contest should be rerun, given that Sturgeon et al knew exactly what was coming down the pipeline and wished to get the election over and done with, all the better for their supposed ‘continuity candidate’, poor old Humza. The party’s members may have been rather less inclined to opt for continuity if they had known that continuity involved a very close relationship with the police. The truth is that Kate Forbes was effectively cheated by the leadership of the SNP – and this alone should require the resignation of wee Krankie.

The whole business is having its effect in the opinion polls, with the SNP vote down from a high of 55 per cent two years ago to 39 per cent today: that figure is surely destined to fall further. Labour has gained most of those disaffected votes but the Tories, too, are performing well.

The other problem with ‘continuity’ is that the policies which Sturgeon pursued are not terribly popular with the electorate, despite the party’s huge dominance this century. People vote SNP because they wish for Scotland to be independent of the UK, which is a perfectly respectable aspiration. It is this sense of Scottish identity, its otherness from Englishness, which the voters north of the border find appealing, especially when it is reinforced with a bit of Anglophobic dog-whistling (at which Sturgeon and co have been adept). There is no indication whatsoever that the electorate found her progressive politics, which led to Scotland becoming perhaps the wokest country in Europe, remotely attractive.

Indeed, a recent opinion poll carried out for UnHerd showed that of the top ten most ‘trans-sceptical’ constituencies in the United Kingdom, all bar one were in Scotland – and the other was in Wales. (Incidentally, the most sceptical of the Scottish constituencies were from the Roman Catholic west coast, rather than the Wee Free Presbyterian redoubts.)

This tallies with a previous opinion poll in the country relating to gay marriages and gay adoptions, in which 69 per cent of Scots thought that the ideal circumstances for the raising of a child were for the mother and father, of different genders, to be married. Similarly, 71 per cent disagreed with the suggestion that defending traditional marriage was discriminatory towards gay men and lesbians.

The Scots still self-identify as left-wing, however – and that’s because (rightly in my opinion) they do not consider indentitarian issues to be necessarily of the left, even if it is the liberal left from which they most frequently emanate. The picture is much the same in England, and particularly in those Red-Wall seats won by Boris Johnson in 2019. There, they had no great argument with the left-wing economic policies put forward by John McDonnell, but were brought over to the Conservatives partly by Brexit and partly by Jeremy Corbyn’s hideous wokeness and especially his lack of patriotism (as Sir Keir Starmer well understands).

The problem in Scotland is that in an attempt to counter the Nats’ dominance, the other major parties tagged along with all the idiotic woke stuff – when, in truth, it was really only the prospect of independence which cleaved the voters to the SNP. Currently, then, there is a vacuum in Scottish politics the size of Colin Beattie’s stomach.