If we don our surgical gloves, reach for the handsaw, and pop the Scottish and UK governments onto the anatomy table for a spot of dissection, it becomes clear that Westminster and Holyrood suffer from two very different maladies. Government in Scotland is insipid and uninspiring. The SNP lacks imagination and ideas.

Government at Westminster, however, is chaotic.

For years, the Tories and now Labour have turned politics into a psychodrama. There’s a dangerous churn of Prime Ministers. Internecine warfare and scandal preoccupy cabinet more than policy. Britain feels febrile. Whereas Scotland feels stable. Yes, there’s stagnation in Scottish politics, but not chaos. Indeed, since devolution there’s only been one short bout of chaos when Nicola Sturgeon suddenly quit as First Minister, ushering in a self-lacerating SNP leadership contest won by Humza Yousaf. His unstable premiership was short-lived, and he was replaced by the ultimate safe pair of hands, John Swinney.

Swinney has entrenched that notion of Scotland as a stable country. Though, evidently, he’s not a man to rouse the passions of the people. However, that is, perhaps, no bad thing these days.

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To return to the metaphor of the anatomist: once opened up and examined, Scotland is sick, but certainly not dying. The country needs a good dose of vitamins to revivify it and some physio to get it working again. If political health was graded on a scale of one-to-ten, Scotland is maybe a middling five.

Britain, in the form of Westminster, is in a........

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