You’re tempted to spare a thought for John Swinney after reading Nicola Sturgeon’s new epilogue for her memoir, Frankly. Mr Swinney has spent the last two years defending his predecessor’s honour, having dutifully carried her bags for the previous ten. Is Ms Sturgeon grateful for his heroic attempts at rewriting history on her behalf? No, she is not.

Lamenting a lack of substance in May’s Holyrood election campaign, she writes: “Even from the SNP, which rightly put Scottish independence centrally as an objective, but didn’t always bring alive the opportunities it offers for people in a tangible sense, there was a lack of vision or big-picture thinking.”

So, what’s new? Ms Sturgeon’s entire nine-year tenure as First Minister was characterised by “a lack of vision or big-picture thinking”.

We should perhaps be grateful for her political insularity, though. Just about everything within her narrow focus turned to dust in a decade of unremitting failure. The attainment gap remains wide; our deprived communities are all still deprived; the challenge of addiction became a crisis; no Promise has been delivered and the movement she led has become a nasty, unpleasant and vengeful organism, whose senior officers (including her) stand accused of turning a blind eye to the weapons-grade corruption that was happening in their executive suite. God knows what mayhem would have ensued if she’d started thinking about “the big picture”.

She wasn’t even any good at independence. Having been bequeathed a healthy, united and well-run party of independence which shook the British establishment to its Union Jack foundation garments, she proceeded to squander it. After promising a referendum in almost........

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