Alex Salmond’s final tweet, sent just a few hours before his death last Saturday, was quintessential of the man and the politician. Its valedictory flourish - "Scotland is a country, not a county" - was typical of his penchant for a soundbite.

Its rebuke of First Minister John Swinney was hardly the first time that Mr Salmond had alluded to how Scotland would be in better shape were he still in charge. And the core of its content - that Scotland’s First Minister should not allow him or herself to be pigeonholed in status alongside English regional mayors - was emblematic of the strategic radar of a man who rarely allowed himself to be outflanked by the unionists to the south.

There was plenty of politics behind these final few messages, both internal nationalist politics and external constitutional politics. But behind the politics lies a policy problem which is entirely of the SNP’s own creation, both under Mr Salmond and Mr Swinney and indeed Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf in between.

Read more by Andy Maciver

The event about which Mr Salmond was tweeting was Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s inaugural Council of the Nations and Regions. The gathering was relatively controversial from the word "go", and as soon as it was announced earlier in the month, complaints surfaced both from SNP Glasgow council leader Susan Aitken and, perhaps more surprisingly given the party allegiance, Labour’s Edinburgh council leader Cammy Day. Why are we not there, they howled, when you have Andy Burnham and his ilk from the cities of England?

The answer was, in........

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