Anyone who thinks they can blame Nicola Sturgeon and her government for making a mess of one aspect of the vaccine rollout had better think again because it was crystal clear on Thursday that their criticism will at once be switched by the First Minister into an attack on the health service heroes and heroines who have been getting those jabs into our arms. 

That was the ridiculous situation Douglas Ross, the Tory leader, found himself in when he, entirely fairly, said in the Scottish Parliament that it was all the SNP government’s fault that those people who had been told that they could now get a booster discovered that they couldn’t when they turned up at vaccination centres.

They’d been prepared to roll up their sleeves because La Sturgeon had said they should, as had her chief clinical adviser, Professor Jason Leitch, several days previously, now that the gap between second vaccine and booster for 40s and 50s had been reduced from six months to three.

However, after being on the receiving end of a heap of jargon about the fact that certain protocols were necessary because vaccinations were clinical procedures that usually took time to implement, Mr Ross was then treated to a mini-lecture about how Scotland’s record in the vaccine rollout was the best in Britain.

Ms Sturgeon’s Twitter ‘investigation’

To be fair, Ms Sturgeon did say she was sorry that a small number of people had been affected by the “glitch” on Wednesday but she had noticed on Twitter that a journalist in England had suffered a similar problem.

Mr Ross had to remind her that, her Twitter investigation notwithstanding, although all Scottish 14 health boards had been told to get cracking with the new booster rules, only five had done so, another five would be doing so “soon” and he had no information of the other four.

Neither that statement, nor his claim that her communication about the changed vaccine rules had been a “mess”, made any impression whatsoever on the First Minister who, by this stage in the cross-examination, was determined to change the subject away from her failings and on to what she insisted was the “success story” of her vaccine delivery.

Furthermore, anyone who challenged her record of achievement was actually attacking all those who had worked their socks off in getting the jabs into Scottish arms. Mr Ross protested loudly that was not his aim and, indeed, he’d specifically praised all connected with the programme in his opening remarks.

(At this stage, I should say that I’ve never understood why vaccinations in Scotland are called “jags”, not “jabs”, and I’ve been around for a very long time. But then the Nats will presumably say it’s because I’m a Scot-hating Unionist that I call them “jabs”).

Praise for Boris Johnson? Not quite …

Still, I digress; not only did her government’s rollout rate beat everyone else’s in the UK but she said that praise was due to everyone connected with the vaccination programme – especially those who had developed the vaccines and those who had designed the rollout programme.

For a second or two this onlooker thought that she might be just about on the verge of praising Boris Johnson and his government for having the nous and the wherewithal to make sure that the UK was at the forefront of the world’s vaccination programme. But, I should have known better; in the parallel universe that Ms Sturgeon and her ardent followers inhabit, the vaccines “just” appeared, as if by magic, and were paid for, presumably, by a good fairy.

Mr Ross persisted with his attack, saying that there was a backlog of some two million people for jabs – sorry, jags – but all he got from that was another reminder from La Sturgeon that her government’s record in vaccine rollout was the best in these islands.

And that was that …