Nicola Sturgeon is trapped. While many of her activists are growing impatient with their quest for independence, the Scottish electorate is becoming less interested in the constitutional question. This conundrum is becoming increasingly clear to both sides, and the ultimate victim of the arising frustration will be Sturgeon herself.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The First Minister had been in post less than two years when the Brexit vote supposedly reset the clock on independence and annulled the mandate of the 2014 referendum. 

Almost everyone, including many prominent Unionist supporters of the Remain campaign, had been very insistent that a Leave victory would be a gift to the SNP. Sturgeon herself seems to have believed it, setting her sails the morning after the vote to catch the winds of change.

But they never came. Several years of tortuous and divisive negotiations were not the advert for unpicking the United Kingdom that so many supposed.

It was not until the pandemic, and the Government’s woeful mishandling thereof, that it looked as if public support for independence might be building and the doomsayers got to briefly dust off their I-told-you-sos. But even that fillip seems to have been temporary, and the Union is once again leading the polls.

If Sturgeon seemed in 2016 to have time on her side, that is no longer the case. She is already Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister. Even if she does as she says and sees out the term of this Scottish Parliament, we are almost certainly entering the autumn of her leadership.

Thus, the trap. As a pragmatist, Sturgeon understands that it would ill-serve the separatist cause to fight and lose two referenda in a row. It might even serve to bury the question, as it did in Quebec.

Yet the SNP has conspicuously failed to build public support for their central mission, to the extent that the Government at Westminster feels able to simply refuse to grant the First Minister a second legally-binding vote.

This probably suits the strategist in Sturgeon just fine. She gets to blame London for refusing the will of the people without actually having to risk putting her case to the people in unpropitious circumstances.

But that isn’t good enough for much of her base. They are separatists first and foremost; it’s what brought them into politics and it’s why they back the SNP. It’s why they have for years put up with their party’s phalanx-like internal discipline. 

The SNP is perhaps the most formidable political machine in Britain, and it is animated and perhaps even held together by the anticipation of a referendum. (One reason Boris Johnson would be insane to grant one.)

Every year, Sturgeon tells her supporters that the next great push for independence is just around the corner. It never comes to pass. Nor will it, unless a general election in 2023 somehow delivers a government at Westminster prepared to grant a legal referendum.

She knows why a Catalan-style wildcat referendum is a bad idea. Even if the courts don’t block it (and it would only take a private citizen in Scotland to file the suit, not the UK Government), Unionists would simply boycott it.

At the same time, it would undermine Scottish nationalism’s carefully-constructed international image — and perhaps make it that bit harder for the First Minister to find a comfortable role at the UN when she steps down from frontline politics, too.

But the Nationalist infantry, whose cause is independence at any cost, have never accepted this logic. And they won’t let the grand old countess of Bute House march them up and down the hill forever.