Bristling like an incensed hedgehog, First Minister snaps she won the election and can have a referendum when she wants

Now is not the time. That’s what Theresa May kept telling Nicola Sturgeon in March, when Scotland’s First Minister demanded another referendum on independence. Three months later, the First Minister has apparently decided she agrees.

Yesterday, Ms Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh that she’d been “reflecting” and “listening”.

She’d “spoken to many people” who voted Yes to independence at the last referendum, in 2014, and they “feel it is just too soon right now to make a firm decision about the precise timing of a referendum. They want greater clarity about Brexit to emerge first.”

Ms Sturgeon announced that she would therefore “reset” her plan. She insisted, however, that she remained “committed to giving Scotland a choice”, and so would seek to hold a referendum “at the end of the Brexit process”.

Which is interesting. Because she originally wanted a referendum in autumn 2018. And “the end of the Brexit process” comes in March 2019.

Lexicographers will no doubt be alert to the First Minister’s latest pioneering work on the English language. Just as she redefined “once-in-a-generation referendum” to mean “once every four years”, now she’s redefined “to reset” as “to delay by six months”.

Unionist MSPS were unimpressed. Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories, taunted Ms Sturgeon, saying she was paying for her hubris in “trying to secure her place in history”.

“First Minister, when will you listen, and get back to the job that really matters?” asked Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, in that earnest, piping manner which always makes her sound as if she’s reading aloud an essay about the plight of the rainforests at school assembly.

Even the Scottish Greens – normally so supportive of the nationalists – had a pop, albeit from the other side of the argument. Patrick Harvie, their leader, was irate that a referendum wouldn’t be held sooner.

The best line, though, came from Murdo Fraser (Con, Mid Scotland & Fife).

“The First Minister is fond of referring to the 62 per cent of Scots who voted Remain as an ‘overwhelming majority’,” he said. “How would she describe the 63 per cent of Scots who this month voted for parties that opposed a second independence referendum?”

Personally, I would love to hear that, but disappointingly Ms Sturgeon refused to let on. Instead, bristling like an incensed hedgehog, she snapped that “the SNP won the election!”

Odd. If the SNP won the election, Ms Sturgeon should surely be in 10 Downing Street, using her newfound authority as Prime Minister to cancel Brexit and declare Scotland independent forthwith.

What a missed opportunity. But then the SNP can’t have won. As the Corbynistas keep telling us, that was Labour.

More seriously, though, when you look at the numbers, there was clearly only one winner: the DUP.