Both are humbled, isolated, diminished ...what fates await May and Sturgeon?

There are striking parallels between Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon. Both are shy, even austere personalities; both attained high office via ambition and hard graft, rather than stellar ability; and both succeeded flamboyant personalities undone by referendum defeats.

Both won leadership by coronation, rather than a full election contest with debate. Both women are intensely controlling; both like to surround themselves with a tight coterie of advisers – and both, on June 8, were grievously and strategically defeated.

Both won more votes and seats than their opponents. But they were humiliated. May threw away a working majority by calling a cynical and unnecessary general election; and Sturgeon allowed that same campaign in Scotland to become a referendum about a referendum – a second poll on independence few ordinary Scots want.

May and Sturgeon are now profoundly diminished figures. The First Minister is at least fortunate to command a party with a tradition of spaniel-like devotion to its chiefs, however badly they do (in 1987 Gordon Wilson capped a woeful general election campaign by losing his own seat – yet he was kept on as SNP leader).

The Tories are far more ruthless. Mrs May will never be allowed to lead them into another election and may yet be deposed before year’s end – or choose herself, hurt and humiliated, in the near future to quit.

her beloved advisers are banished; pet policies, such as the revival of grammar schools, have been binned – and no one is afraid of her any more, with Philip hammond (and others) behaving with open insolence.

BUT any threat to Mrs May is exclusively an internal one, from within Conservative ranks. As long as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – very old pals of Irish republicanism and its tradition of ‘physical force’ – command Labour, there are no conceivable circumstances in which the Democratic Unionist Party will bring this Government down.

There is, contrary to widespread belief, no necessity for another general election if Mrs May is replaced as Prime Minister – ours is a parliamentary system, not a presidential one – and the next Conservative campaign will be of very different character from the late and hapless roadshow: Jeremy Corbyn and his ludicrous policies will be eaten for breakfast.

Things look far more ominous for Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government. The Nationalists have now been in power for a decade and have accomplished nothing of substance. There is an unsettling sense it is time for change.

Sturgeon is now an unpopular figure; her party more unpopular than independence. Foes the Nationalists had arrogantly assumed quite smitten – the Tories and Labour – are unexpectedly resurgent; and the near-festive air of the summer of 2014 has departed.

Scots are no longer talking about hope and change and dizzying possibilities for an independent realm flowing with oil-bought goodies. We are now anxiously watching the Brexit negotiations, sensing a national crisis bigger than any since Suez.

And the problems with our faltering schools, our stuttering NhS and our decaying infrastructure are now the talk of the steamie. Why, many wonder, has so much time and energy been consumed by constitutional debate since the SNP won an unprecedented overall majority in 2011? And why have they so little to show for these six years, save for a new Forth bridge that has not even been finished on time?

The Air Departure Tax (Scotland) 2017 Act, finally voted through on Tuesday, was the first substantial legislation at holyrood since spring last year. On the same day John Swinney unveiled the new – and eviscerated – ‘Named Person’ legislation, which will no longer be obligatory and is, thus, essentially meaningless.

The scheme, in its original totalitarian form, was struck down last year by the Supreme Court, which ruled it was in conflict with basic human rights. It should never have got past a competent legislator and is a reminder that the Scottish parliament is fundamentally flawed.

It was too easy for the SNP, with an overall majority, to stuff holyrood’s assorted committees; and all parties now so obsessively screen their central lists of approved candidates that fewer men and women of real ability – and serious character – will now submit to the indignities of such a process.

Is it any wonder that – with such honourable exceptions as Christine Grahame – Nationalist MSPs have failed in any meaningful way to hold their government to account? That so few at holyrood can give an arresting speech or even ask the First Minister a question without reading it aloud? This matters, because for the next two years there is going to be unprecedented focus on the Scottish parliament and what it is really doing about real issues affecting real lives.

Westminster will be doing nothing but supervising Brexit, and any prospect of a second independence referendum was slain a fortnight ago.

These have been racking, emotional weeks: an absurdly protracted election campaign and its bizarre outcome, a succession of terrorist outrages and the Grenfell tragedy.

FeeLINGS are running high and some of the rhetoric from Labour’s less herbivorous figures challenges constitutional democracy itself

Ordinary people are sick of austerity. But the public purse strings cannot be loosened until the economy significantly improves, and this is why a wisely negotiated Brexit – with all it entails for trade and commerce and tourism and our standing in the wider world – is so important, and why Parliament will have little time for anything else.

If May must be removed – or chooses to depart – then the succession is hugely significant. The smart money is on David Davis, a gritty minister of council estate upbringing and a conviction Brexiteer; a man who came up on his own merits. Any attempt to replace Mrs May with a clownish public-school type such as Boris Johnson would seem retrograde and irresponsible.

Meanwhile, holyrood must return to the sort of government long conspicuous by its absence.

The people of Scotland do not want, in this generation, independence. They voted it down on an enormous turnout in September 2014. They rallied, last spring, to the Scottish Tories for alone making an unambiguous stand against it. When Sturgeon still refused to get the message, they voted tactically against her party a fortnight ago.

We had expected some Tory surge; the recovery of Scottish Labour was the night’s biggest surprise – and their failure quite to kill it off the SNP’s biggest disappointment. Both parties of opposition are now in pursuit of Bute house.

We should not quite write the SNP off for the 2021 holyrood election. But Sturgeon would be well advised to allow more candid internal debate within party ranks; and to acknowledge many traditional SNP voters – the sort who turned savagely on the party in Moray, Gordon, and Banff and Buchan – do not share her priorities or fathom her emphases.

Let the banners be set aside; let the constitutional grandstanding cease. Scotland needs visible government – and good government; and good fulltime government. Above all, we could use some blessed normality.