Sturgeon’s lame and limping in her race to break up Britain...

IN the surreal film comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there’s a scene where King Arthur and his knights are confronted by a killer rabbit lurking in a cave.

The traditional battle cry of ‘Charge!’ is abruptly changed to ‘Run away! Run away!’ as the intrepid adventurers temporarily forget they are brave warriors – and put self-preservation first.

Ignoble and downright cowardly it may be, but running away is a basic human instinct in times of peril – as Nicola Sturgeon demonstrated at the weekend at her party’s Aberdeen conference. Having led her troops into the fray last year with an abortive call for a second independence referendum, she is now signalling a retreat of spectacular proportion: ‘Run away! Run away!’

She marched them up to the top of the hill, but the view on the other side was bleak and barren – electoral disaster beckoned. So now, with heavy heart, she’s marching them back down again.

The personal tragedy for the First Minister is that she is in headlong retreat from the only idea in which she has ever truly believed, an abandonment of a core belief in the face of insurmountable odds.

Squandered

It’s also a major blow for the wider movement, of course, and a belated tacit admission that the past 11 years in government have been squandered on a project that is now in utter disarray.

Miss Sturgeon’s message to supporters was that it was time to ‘stop obsessing’ about the timing of Indyref 2. She sounded less than convinced when asked if there would be a second poll while she was in office: ‘I think there will be.’

Instead, she said, there was a need to ‘engage people in the substantive arguments’ – much as she did on Friday in that car crash Channel 4 interview when she was quizzed about the start-up costs for an independent Scotland.

Memory can be fickle, but it’s a bad day when you forget the content of a report you commissioned, which has just produced its final conclusions, suggesting that £450million would be needed to bankroll the break-up of Britain.

When it’s been your lifelong goal and the driving mission of your political career, being unable to recall such a figure – such a big figure – surely goes beyond a ‘senior moment’: perhaps this was a case of strategic amnesia.

Miss Sturgeon knew that if she were to appear on television accurately quoting from her Growth Commission’s report, the clip, on the eve of her keynote speech, would ‘go viral’: maybe a lawyerly failure of memory was far preferable.

Running away, at full tilt, from the ‘substantive arguments’ is a time-honoured Nationalist tactic, but it’s surprising when the party has spent so long crafting its own version of the Holy Grail – that report which Miss Sturgeon found so memorable.

Former Nationalist MSP Andrew Wilson spearheaded efforts to make the renewed case for separatism credible, but succeeded in coming up with a dog-eared plan dusted off from 2014, using the pound without permission, akin to Panama-style ‘dollarisation’.

The recent, low-key release of that report, on the Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend, showed beyond doubt there had been a recognition at the highest levels of the party that a surplus of detail in the blueprint for independence was a terrible error.

Far from paving the way to Indyref 2, with all the awkward questions from last time answered, it sparked internecine warfare within Nationalist circles, with many aggrieved the report wasn’t radically Left-wing enough.

Robin McAlpine, director of the pro-independence Common Weal think-tank, said the report was ‘suspiciously long and the core case is buried in a blizzard of standard neoclassical economic growth theory expressed in a kind of anodyne Prozac language’. Well, it’s always nice to get feedback…

In March last year, Miss Sturgeon first attempted to breathe new life into Indyref 2, presidentially announcing a fresh bout of constitutional conflict as if it were within her gift to authorise another poll, without the UK Government’s blessing.

There was a general sense back then that another referendum was inevitable – and the old campaign groups on both sides were in the process of regrouping – before Theresa May made it clear any such plebiscite would have no legal authority with her mantra: ‘Now is not the time.’

The process of running away from such an indomitable foe began almost immediately after that injection of crushing realism, and accelerated after the electoral setback of the snap election in June last year, when the SNP vote collapsed and it lost 21 of its MPs.

Miss Sturgeon is now in the business of ‘expectation management’: with her own popularity on the slide, and no sign of increasing support for independence, she is gently taking her foot off the accelerator, despite knowing it’s a risky manoeuvre.

Prisoner

She is a prisoner of forces beyond her control, because frankly all those activists who flooded the Nationalist ranks after Indyref 1 will not allow her to set aside their ultimate goal indefinitely. So her retreat is likely to be a circular one, locked on constant repeat.

Even former top SNP spin doctor Kevin Pringle now believes ‘the likelihood is there won’t be another independence referendum any time soon’ and ‘realistically, it will probably require another Holyrood majority at the 2021 election to overcome Westminster’s veto’.

Yet one hardened former Yesser told me: ‘If she tries to slow this down, thinks she can put it on the backburner, there could be lynch mobs.’

This is quite a reversal for Miss Sturgeon, more accustomed to rock-star treatment in the heady days of her fame, stadiums full of unquestioning acolytes and tours of Scotland in the ‘Nicolopter’.

Amid the retreat, as the fog of war recedes, the extensive damage suffered during the gruelling Nationalist incumbency at Holyrood becomes all too clear – a string of catastrophic policy failures and a lack of dynamism and vision beyond the central constitutional mission.

Littering that ruined landscape are baby boxes, the husk of the Named Person policy, the now-rescinded legislation to ban sectarian chanting at football matches, a dysfunctional police service and an education system blighted by staff shortages and curricular chaos.

For too long, reform of failing public services was subordinate to the need for perpetual conflict with the UK Government. Now there appears to have been an acknowledgement that the alleged bogeyman of Brexit simply hasn’t converted enough Scots to the separatist cause.

But there is no running away from the final truth of those long years of Nationalist rule, during which the business of government took second place to a dream that was repeatedly exposed as a delusion.

Now that it’s ending, there is precious little to show for more than a decade in power.