Somewhere in hell there’s a snowball laughing at Anas Sarwar. I’m old enough to remember last summer when everyone was convinced that the SNP were dead and Labour was going to moonwalk victorious into Bute House come the next Holyrood election.

Well, as matters stand, there’s about as much chance of that as there is of someone, anyone, tuning in to watch a show – any show – on BBC Scotland.

Keir Starmer has taken Sarwar’s hopes of becoming First Minister and drop-kicked them into the sun. To be fair to Starmer, Sarwar has ably assisted in the destruction of his own ambitions. It’s not all the fault of King Charisma down there in that London.

Starmer started throttling the life out of Sarwar’s dreams the moment he and his equally scintillating Cabinet plodded flat-footed into Number 10.

There were absurd venal scandals, more gaffes than Homes Under the Hammer, and an aping of the Tories which sickened anyone who’d been wide-eyed and innocent enough to fall for Labour’s deliberately vague promise of "change".

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What we got was a changing of the guard, not change in any real or substantive way. It’s hard to see the difference between the current Labour Government and Tory governments under the likes of Theresa May or David Cameron.

It’s not the bug-eyed madness of Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, or the slightly less insane chaos of Rishi Sunak, but it’s still pretty damn Conservative.

Despite the ugliness and failure of the Starmer government, Sarwar might have stood a chance of keeping his Holyrood hopes alive if he’d put some clear red water between him and Tory-blue Starmer.........

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