So there we have it: It’s not a slip, it’s just a refinement...

WHen it comes to breaking promises, politicians have their own grammar. I had limited success. You have failed. We will learn lessons. To these rules of conjugation we can now add, ‘We refined the target’.

Ruth Davidson had asked nicola Sturgeon why the vaccine rollout was ‘lagging behind in Scotland’. Sturgeon denied this scurrilous calumny.

The Tory leader reminded her that Health Secretary Jeane Freeman had pledged to vaccinate all over-80s by January 31 but now John Swinney had pencilled in February 7.

‘We refine the target dates as we go along, based on our developing understanding of supply,’ came the response.

‘There we have it, Presiding Officer,’ Davidson snorted. ‘It is not a slip, it is a refinement.’ Celtic could do with the First Minister’s PR skills right now. ‘We’re not 20 points behind Rangers; we’re just refining the number of matches we win.’

Sharing her pain over GPs’ sparse vaccine supplies, Sturgeon sighed: ‘every day, I look… at those numbers. I go to sleep at night with them in my head, and wake up in the morning with them in my head.’ The First

Minister is very stoical about how hard all this is on her. Sometimes she goes entire days without tweeting about it.

ey up. Richard Leonard’s accent had suddenly gone all west-Scotland-posh. He was dressing better, too. Jackie Baillie was standing in as Labour leader after Leonard was elbowed out in a coup, which she had absolutely nothing to do with.

Some inside the Workers’ Party are miffed that Leonard is keeping his top spot on the Central Scotland list but it’s not much of a consolation prize. At least Khrushchev got a pension and a dacha; Leonard has been sentenced to five years of surgeries on dog-fouling in Falkirk.

Baillie was after stats on how many doses of the vaccine had been wasted so far. Sturgeon sought to reassure her that, although ministers had planned for 5 per cent wastage, so far it has been 1 per cent.

‘In any vaccination programme there will be human error,’ Sturgeon explained. ‘People will drop vials and they will break, people will make an error in opening them and putting the vaccine into a syringe, or somebody will have got a syringe ready for somebody who either does not turn up for the vaccine or turns up but for some reason cannot be vaccinated.’

Baillie appeared sceptical: ‘At the weekend, wastage was at 1.82 per cent. To put that in real terms, that is something like 5,000 doses since the rollout began, when people desperately need this vaccine. Are we to believe that that is all to do with burst vials and spillages?’

Sturgeon chuntered from her seat and rolled her eyes. ‘Unless someone is telling me that on the front line there are dastardly, secret attempts – of unknown motivation – not to use every possible dose of vaccine, I am confident in the people who are doing the vaccination programme.’

Willie Rennie, a sparky wee slugger wasted in the Lib Dems, reminded Sturgeon of her repeated refusals to embrace the various testing regimes. Her eyes went ceiling-wards again.

IF I really thought that they could help us beat this virus and save lives, why on earth would I oppose them?’ she wondered, wounded. Rennie turned snotty: ‘God forbid we ever ask questions of the First Minister when we think she gets it wrong.’ Sturgeon protested that she had answered more questions than any leader. In fairness, it’s only her and Kim Jong-un who have their own daily TV show.

The Presiding Officer blew the final whistle, adding: ‘We’ll resume at 2.30pm with a statement on drugs.’ It would be an improvement.