Nicola Sturgeon’s fall from grace is astonishing – and she only has herself to blame

You have to wonder how Sturgeon, a trained solicitor and apparently canny politician, ended up in this parodic situation

One of the finest comedies to emerge in recent years is Scottish. Scot Squad is made by BBC Scotland and is a mockumentary about the unified Police Scotland force, with an especially strong performance by Jack Docherty as chief commissioner Cameron Miekelson, a man whose incompetence is only matched by his pomposity.

There’s one scene where he’s talking to camera about how he climbed up through the ranks and the problems you get when people give you false names or think they’re being funny, like “Mrs Mittens” or “Dawn Chorus”.

“But it’s actually their real names. Nicola Sturgeon, there’s one. I mean, the first time I met Nicola Sturgeon, she says to me, ‘Hello. I’m Nicola Sturgeon’. I go, ‘Oh, right. Yeah, and I’m Harry Haddock.’ But, of course, it turns out she’s actually called Nicola Sturgeon. Ridiculous. So be on your guard.”

I do wonder what Miekelson’s real-life police officers made of things when they rocked up at the Sturgeon family home to turn the place over and took the dirty great £110,000 campervan away. It looked like a scene from Scot Sqaud, this frankly ridiculous situation in which Sturgeon and the whole Scottish National Party find themselves.

One minute Sturgeon is queen of all she surveys, the vanquisher of Alex Salmond – crushed under her stiletto – the dominant political personality of her times, spoken of in the same respectful tones as Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Jacinda Adern, and tipped for a top job at the United Nations.

When she quit you could almost hear the laments for the lost leader emanating from every town and glen. She reassured her people that she’d still be around, ready to dispense wise counsel to her successor, and that they’d somehow manage without her.

The next minute she discovers PC Jack McLaren is rummaging through her knicker drawer, cyber-sleuth Archie Pepper is confiscating the hard drive and they’ve arrested her hubbie. It’s like a satirical mini tartan version of when the FBI came to get Trump.

You have to wonder how Sturgeon, a trained solicitor and apparently canny politician ended up in this parodic situation. Rarely can a politician and indeed an entire political party have fallen from grace quite so rapidly.

We are, after all, in a position where the Scottish National Party might go bust, might therefore find itself struck off by the Electoral Commission if it then chooses to de-register, or fails to provide the annual notification required to remain on the register and have to disband and reform as the (rumoured) “Scottish Independence Party”, having shed plenty of members and voters along the way.

And none of it, none of it at all, can be blamed on wicked English Tories or anyone else but themselves.

Were Sturgeon a little less sanctimonious you might actually feel a bit sorry for her

Were Sturgeon a little less sanctimonious you might actually feel a bit sorry for her; but from the latest leaked video of her addressing her party’s National Executive Committee she sounds as arrogant and paranoid as she seems to have become.

But then maybe she always was like that, if she thought when she came to power in 2014 that it was OK for her to be the party leader and first minister and for her husband, Peter Murrell, to be the chief executive.

You could imagine the lurid accusations of conflicts of interest that she’d throw at such an unconventional arrangement in any rival political party. So how did she, he or the pair of them think it was anything but glaringly dangerous? Apart, that is, from an excess of self-confidence and lack of scrutiny? It has inevitably given rise to this crisis.

What, if anything, did she know about the £106,000 Murrell lent to the party, a curious sum? Or the £110,000 mobile holiday home/referendum “battle bus” that wound up on their drive? What did the others on the SNP NEC reckon to any of this? Why did the auditors quit? What did she know – and when – about the police raid, and why did she really resign?

So many questions, and ones that will hang around her and the SNP for some months, if not years. It is perfectly possible that the Scottish electorate have had enough of this parcel of rogues, now led by the defensive continuity candidate Humza Yousaf, and they’ll lose many of their seats at the next UK general election. Labour may well be back in government in Holyrood by 2026, even as a minority administration.

Nicola Sturgeon speaking to reporters (Jane Barlow/PA) (PA Wire)

The SNP doesn’t look like a party ready to govern an independent Scotland and negotiate its entry into the European Union. Stugeon’s career even in Scotland seems finished, and the ambition to run Unesco can be safely put to sleep.

The detail may be bewildering, but it’s not hard to see why all this happened. In any political system, the long dominance of one political party tends to breed complacency, arrogance and worse, because it no longer fears embarrassment or defeat.

We’ve seen that under this UK Conservative government, and under New Labour and the Thatcher-Major government as well. It happens a good deal in big cities run by Labour.

Being in power with weak opposition and for far too long tends to corrupt minds. Under Sturgeon, Scotland was a one-party state. Politics became pantomime, as it would when there is zero chance you’ll actually lose an election and you hold nearly every seat and Labour is left with one.

Some of that SNP success is undoubtedly down to the political talents of the likes of Salmond and Sturgeon, and the frustration many Scots rightly felt about rule by successive English-dominated Tory governments and, above all, Brexit.

Yet it’s also down to Labour and the other unionist parties’ failure to offer something satisfactory and appealing to the Scottish voter. Once so dominant, Labour’s decline in Scotland predates Sturgeon’s rule, and was in its turn also caused by the same kind of complacency and neglect that has led to so much trouble now for the SNP.

It seems clear, from the perspective of a quarter century of devolution, that Labour took Scotland for granted, and assumed that devolution, the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Donald Dewar were all that was needed to keep the nation happy.

They went wrong, just as the SNP went wrong. In any case, as Chief Commissioner Miekelson would say, Scotland deserves better than to be run by this bunch of bams.