Sorry still seems to be the hardest word for a floundering Sturgeon

The Scottish National Party has many winning qualities – at least at election time. Favourites include a gift for spin, for ducking accountability and frittering away public cash. Another is always doing the opposite of what Westminster is doing, however frivolous or petty the matter of divergence. Yesterday in Holyrood, the SNP deployed all these virtues in spades.

At First Minister’s Questions, Nicola Sturgeon was quizzed on the SNP’S ferry fiasco – botched Ferguson Marine contracts estimated to have cost the public £250million – and the mystery of the accompanying documents that had vanished into thin air (or perhaps down the back of the shredder).

Her usual composure had evaporated, leaving a floundering Ms Sturgeon on the hook – and all the accompanying signs were there: jerky head-wobbling and mutinous scowls into the middle-distance. Where was that all-important email approving the contract, asked Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader. Ms Sturgeon, selecting a novel diversionary tactic, reminded him that there were still plenty in the public domain that hadn’t mysteriously disappeared – just not the one the auditor-general wanted. The Mona Lisa might have been nabbed from the Louvre, but at least the Jacques Louis-davids were safe.

Bizarre though this approach seemed, her MSPS erupted with canned applause worthy of a Nineties sitcom. Mr Ross continued his persecution with a sarcastically raised eyebrow.

Ms Sturgeon’s defence, he declared, was on a par with “A big boy did it and ran away – and now the dog ate my homework”. But Ms Sturgeon quickly changed tack. Posing as a fearless employment champion, she cited the 400 workers whose jobs were saved when Ferguson’s dockyard was taken into administration after the contractual blunder.

“It was and is an achievement,” she crowed. “I know jobs don’t matter to the Conservatives, but they matter to this Government!” Too true – at £625,000 per job “saved”, the SNP must care very much indeed.

For the SNP, little can be done in tandem with Westminster – not even something as fundamentally dull as the census. They’d decided to delay theirs by a year while the rest of the UK went ahead, in their words, “to ensure the highest possible response rate” (and naturally, the creation of a superscottish version of the forms, with gender self-id and no box for “British”).

Unfortunately the opposite occurred; a flimsy 74 per cent turnout compared to the near-universal response elsewhere in the UK. Angus Robertson, the SNP spokesman, was hauled in for questioning, though the presiding officer had cut his statement down to five minutes, since everyone knew about the delay already – though he refused to admit the decision was a mistake.

With census-gate expected to cost taxpayers an extra £21.6million, after which the low turnout might render the data useless anyway, there could be few more glaring political own goals. What exactly would it take for the SNP to apologise? And more to the point, if you can’t run a census, how do you expect to run a country?