Schisms, splits and a party waging war with itself...

FOR more than a decade the Scottish National Party has been the dominant force in Scottish politics. It has won election after election and, in 2011, accomplished what we had been assured was a mathematical impossibility – an overall majority in the Scottish parliament.

The Nationalists capped that by coming dramatically close, in September 2014, to winning the independence referendum – had the poll been a week earlier, they probably would have – and then, in May 2015, seized all but three of Scotland’s Westminster seats.

Even last year, despite losing many MPs, they retained a pleasant lead in opinion polls. Such was their grip on power in Edinburgh, few in public or civic life dared to murmur the least criticism of SNP Government policy.

So why does the party seem, now, to be having a collective nervous breakdown?

It began last week when Pete Wishart, MP for Perth and North Perthshire, came out strongly against an early repeat of the independence plebiscite, declaring – quite properly – that the Scottish public are ‘weary of big constitutional choices’.

For his pains, Mr Wishart was vilified on Twitter by assorted online trolls – savaged as a Unionist ‘poster boy’, accused of settling down rather too happily in Westminster and damned (a tad improbably) as an ‘Etonian boot-licker’.

Meanwhile, Chris McEleny – no, I had never heard of him, either, but he commands SNP councillors in Inverclyde and is an outlying candidate for the party’s deputy leadership – has scampered in the opposite direction.

‘Decisions made in Scotland by the people of Scotland are better decisions for Scotland,’ he insists. ‘That is why we should be independent and why we should have a referendum on our independence within the next 18 months.’

ANGUS MacNeil, MP for the Western Isles, made a similar call this week. But like a grumpy old grandpa, Jim Sillars, the former Nationalist MP for Glasgow Govan, on Monday publicly deplored the spectacle of assorted independence supporters ‘turning in on themselves’ and urged folk to ‘lay off’ Pete Wishart.

‘Those of us who have been a long, long time in the independence movement have seen this kind of frustration boil over several times as people fall out, not about the objective, but how to get there,’ the 80-year-old Sillars thundered.

‘The 2014 campaign gave us a foundation of 45 per cent upon which to build, but to raise that to a level of victory demands a high level of maturity, wisdom and organisation so far missing.’

This has been Mr Sillars’s theme since last october, when he went for Nicola Sturgeon herself on live television, pronouncing: ‘We lost seats at Westminster because the day after the [EU] referendum she went helter-skelter for a second referendum, which everyone knew we would lose and most people didn’t want.’

He capped that by suggesting Miss Sturgeon ought to step aside from the SNP leadership for someone of greater ‘intellectual capability… but there’s no one there at the moment, so we’ve got Nicola and I hope Nicola improves’.

one should, of course, make appropriate caveats. Many pro-independence trolls are not members of the SNP. There is no prospect of Mr McEleny becoming the party’s deputy leader and, while he paints himself as a Nationalist veteran, Mr Sillars began his career as a Labour MP, was in his forties before he embraced independence and, time and again, sabotaged his advancement with poor judgment.

A ‘day of reckoning’ outburst from Mr Sillars against Scottish businessmen, the weekend before the independence vote, was typical folly and he has been grumbling so long against SNP strategy that few Nationalists listen any more.

This is a pity because cold reason forces one to agree with him. Most Scots do not want independence. A poll last week showed support had dipped. It follows that most do not want another referendum on the matter either.

Miss Sturgeon has been talking one up since the Brexit vote in June 2016 – the Scottish Government remains committed to a referendum in the lifetime of this parliament – raising the question as to what extent she truly commands her party or merely follows it.

At the root of this lie two political failures in the wake of the 2014 vote. The first was the failure, then or now, to conduct a post-mortem and ask hard, honest questions about why Yes lost. Instead the blame has been cast upon Whitehall, the media and the brainwashed ‘55 per cent’ who refused to follow the party’s call.

The second was the uncontested leadership election that autumn. No one was prepared to oppose Miss Sturgeon, so there was no serious SNP conversation about the future.

HISTORY attests that prime ministers anointed by coronation rather than elected tend to be pretty awful. Notable turkeys include Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden and Gordon Brown – all unopposed darlings. Jack McConnell in 2001 won command of Scottish Labour without an opponent and piled it six years later on the rocks.

Miss Sturgeon is not without virtue. She is an infamously hard worker, has a sly sense of humour, not least at her own expense, and an admirable disdain for gossip. But she is not of formidable intellect or original mind and has not once shown herself capable of resisting demands, from the most introverted SNP activists, for another independence vote.

By leaving the door ajar for one in the SNP’s 2016 Holyrood manifesto, she let the Tories back into Scottish politics as the one party unambiguously opposed to a poll.

Learning nothing, she committed herself still more volubly to a referendum within hours of our vote to leave the European Union and set the machinery in motion last spring, weeks before she was startled (and duly battered) by a surprise general election.

The loss of two dozen Westminster seats should have been a warning. The referendum issue is not her only problem. Many Yes Scotland activists have drifted to the Greens. Scottish Labour, for the first time in years, is prepared to campaign against the SNP from the Left and it is unlikely the next parliament will have a pro-independence majority.

Nor – thanks to the SNP’s infamous selection procedures, guaranteed to filter out anyone of character, independence or original thought – is there an obvious alternative leader.

Angus robertson appears to have left professional politics and Alex Salmond has thrown away a reputation decades in the building to become a circus act for Mother russia.

The First Minister, it seems, is trapped on an escalator she cannot stop and from which she cannot alight, rumbling blindly to the stuff of dreams. Bad dreams.