We must ensure a mess like

I Nthe increasingly acrimonious, or to speak plainly, vicious battle between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, there may be little that is not hotly disputed. There is, however, one point that is now uncontestable: that this has become the greatest scandal of the devolutionary era.

To say so isn’t to make any judgment about the rights and wrongs of this issue. Indeed, the reluctance of both camps to make information available is the very thing that makes it difficult for anyone to make judgments. But the magnitude of the row, and the extraordinary spectacle of two successive First Ministers and leaders of the SNP now openly calling each other liars, is certainly without precedent.

It is a crisis that matters not just to the two combatants, nor to internal turf wars within the

SNP, nor even to the clash between opposition parties and government, but to the ability of the Scottish Parliament to hold the Government up to scrutiny.

And by extension, since Holyrood and its committees are supposed to do so in the public interest, to the people of Scotland, justice, ministerial accountability and the truth. The scandal lies as much in the fact that the apparatus and procedures designed to ensure that have failed as it does in the allegations from both camps.

Indeed, the central question for the credibility of Scotland’s governance is not now what the two inquiries were designed to elicit – whether the Government mishandled the allegations against Mr Salmond, why it pursued the judicial review case at great cost when it was advised it would lose, and whether Ms Sturgeon misled the parliament. It is whether parliament’s inability, so far, to do so is caused by some structural imbalance in the devolutionary set-up.

If the executive is able to ignore direct instructions given to it by the parliament, that is a significant flaw in the system of checks and balances and an obvious danger to democratic norms. That is true whether or