No wonder the SNP is starting to worry

WIll anyone get any sleep between now and June 8 because of all the whistling in the dark the Snp is doing?

no wonder it’s worried. a series of polls predicts a Tory surge and the latest survey from YouGov says ruth davidson’s Conservatives are on course to take eight seats in Scotland.

one is moray. The fall of angus robertson, deputy leader of the Snp and leader of the noisy – and impotent – separatist cohort at Westminster would be more than embarrassing for the nationalists.

mr robertson’s seat is precarious because of the Eu. nicola Sturgeon, desperate to find some grievance that would bolster her shrill calls for Indyref 2, committed the Snp to campaigning for full membership. That was watered down when miss Sturgeon belatedly woke up to the fact that a great many of the 1,018,322 Scots who voted leave were nationalists with no intention of wresting power from Westminster only to hand it to distant Brussels.

It means that when mr robertson rose to his feet in the Commons to lecture on Scotland being ‘ripped from the bosom of Europe against our will’, he was ignoring perhaps half his constituents.

History may yet record that miss Sturgeon’s mistake of assuming all Scots are Europhiles like her, coupled with her indecent haste to hitch the nationalist wagon to the faceless Eu, consigned her party to the wilderness for a generation – a real generation this time.

Several Snp chickens are coming home to roost at the worst time for her. miss Sturgeon and alex Salmond both declared the 2014 referendum once-in-a-lifetime. They’d rather we forgot that.

They’d also rather we forgot their woeful record in Scotland where the nHS is in crisis, education is a disgrace, justice is shambolic, transport sclerotic, economic growth feeble. again, Scots aren’t fooled.

So the best the Snp can do is fall back on anti-Tory rhetoric – and the polls show how spectacularly that has failed.

Support for independence is slipping and the heady days of 56 out of 59 Scottish mps being Snp look over. YouGov suggests the Snp will be on 47, with eight for the Tories, three for the lib dems and one for labour. That’s damaging for the nationalists when they need to prove they are not faltering.

In complete contrast to david Cameron, whose uncertain grasp of Scotland was ruthlessly exploited by the Snp, Theresa may sees through its sophistry.

She tells the mail today her firm view that Indyref 2 is unwanted in Scotland will not be changed by the Snp retaining a majority of mps.

How very heartening for the majority of Scots tired of nationalist agitation over independence, fed up with a distracted Scottish Government presiding over declining services and standards and burdened by excessive taxes on their hard-earned income.

miss Sturgeon’s strident calls to rally to the discredited Eu have fallen on deaf ears and now her ‘evil Tories’ trope is being tuned out like an irritating echo from a distant age.

polls are snapshots, not predictions, says the old saw. The Snp is reduced to repeating that mantra with fingers crossed – it seems unlikely to be enough.