Editorial Comment:

Yesterday, addressing the inquiry into the Scottish government’s botched investigation into sexual misconduct claims against him, Alex Salmond suggested that Nicola Sturgeon is not fit to lead Scotland to independence. He is correct. It was an extraordinary claim for a man with his politics to make, and an indictment of the entire nationalist project. Mr Salmond would not want us to see it that way, of course: this crisis, he insisted, is a failure of personnel, not institutions or ideals.

But how else did Scotland end up in this mess if not because the SNP’S single-minded obsession with independence drove it there?

As Mr Salmond’s evidence suggested, there is something fundamentally wrong, or even rotten, with the whole way the Scottish government is functioning, from the civil service to the legal system. The minutiae of who did what, or when, will cut through less to the casual observer than the flagrant attempt to censor evidence and keep the public in the dark.

As in a banana republic, the lack of transparency is matched by a lack of accountability. Not a “single person has taken responsibility,” said Mr Salmond: there has not been “a single resignation or sacking, not even admonition”.

But if the institutions have proven so flawed, and the SNP so supremely arrogant, does it not occur to Mr Salmond that he had helped to create this culture?

For the SNP, everything is about independence. The end justifies the means. The party is obsessed with infighting – Mr Salmond said he watched in astonishment when Ms Sturgeon “used a Covid press conference to effectively question the results of a jury” – and uninterested in running a government properly, just as it is uninterested in representing Scotland competently in Westminster.

For the SNP, office is a platform to push nationalism, and the Sturgeon versus Salmond fight is the inevitable consequence of that warped philosophy.

People’s precious time and money is being poured away, and the scandal should concern all Britons, for when something so egregious can occur in one part of the UK, it offends the whole of the country. The cause of independence under this broken nationalist leadership now looks less credible than ever.