It is, in Scotland, the eternal question: how have the SNP managed to defy political gravity for so long despite an ever-growing list of policy failures? 

The inevitable follow-up question is usually voiced with a sense of frustration: will that political gravity kick in any time soon?

The answer to the second question is: nobody knows for sure. Polling suggests no end in sight yet for the nationalist hegemony that has prevailed for seven years so far. The key, perhaps, for Nicola Sturgeon’s opponents in Scotland, is to keep on keeping on, constantly reminding voters of the dismal record of the Holyrood government so that when (or if) the time comes when Scots get tired of tolerating the third rate delivery of their devolved government, everything will be in place for the next seismic political shift.

The last week of March 2022 may well come to be recognised as the period when the weaknesses of Sturgeon’s leadership were finally – though not yet fatally – exposed. The saga of Ferguson’s ship yard in Port Glasgow has been one of colossal ministerial misjudgment and incompetence, to the extent that the key players are now standing around pointing fingers at each other like the Mexican standoff scene at the end of Reservoir Dogs.

In short, the ship yard, when it was owned by billionaire independence supporter, Jim McColl, was given the contract to build two ferries to serve island communities on Scotland’s west coast, at a cost of £97 million. But the job was too much for the yard: not only have the ships not yet been completed, but their costs have spiralled to more than twice the original budget.

One other thing that ought to be mentioned: the ship yard went bust in 2019 and had to be nationalised by the Scottish Government – two years after a photo opportunity “launch” of the one of the boats for the benefit of the First Minister, in which the husk of the uncompleted ship was made to look ready by the simple technique of painting the windows onto it.

And then there was the £2 million that ministers paid to a consultant drafted to sort out the ship yard and get it back on track.

Apart from that, however, everything is going to plan, in a very Scottish sort of way.

Most of this was gleefully seized upon by Sturgeon’s opponents at First Minister’s Questions yesterday, during which Sturgeon described the £2 million cost for the consultant as “the market rate”. Wearing a suitably outraged face for the occasion, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar asked, “Market rate? Three thousand pounds a day? Were you signing Lionel Messi?”

Sturgeon, as she is prone to do these days, looked uncomfortable and angry. The job just doesn’t seem to be as much fun as it used to be, for some reason. Partly it’s the Scottish media’s increasing willingness to report on ministerial failures, and partly it is the increasing impatience by some on her own side. Yesterday even saw that rare event – an SNP MSP saying something that was not wholly supportive of the First Minister (we’re still a long way from when nationalist MSPs will actually criticise their own leadership publicly). Fergus Ewing, a former minister, warned Sturgeon not to neglect Scotland’s thriving oil and gas sector as a way of rebalancing our reliance on foreign energy sources. 

But Sturgeon was having none of that: she is keen to remind voters – and particularly her government allies in the Scottish Greens – that not only is it not Scotland’s oil, no one (and certainly not she) has ever suggested otherwise.

And then there’s the long shadow of Covid. Sturgeon, a high profile advocate of the political philosophy that governments need to control as much of their citizens’ behaviour as possible, has been most reluctant to scrap the mask mandate in public places. Just this week she announced that, unlike England, Scots would be forced to wear them until Easter. She described England as a “global outlier” when Boris Johnson removed the mandate in January.

But when in Rome, etc: when the First Minister attended the memorial service for the Duke of Edinburgh in London this week, she decided to take a risk by not wearing a mask. This is odd: if England is, as she claims “an outlier”, that means she believes masks should still be worn there. Yet she chose not to wear one anyway, while Scots back home are still being forced to do so.

Hovering over this morass of hypocrisy and ineptitude is the answer to the first question I posed earlier: the reason political gravity has had no effect on the SNP’s popularity is that everything other than independence is regarded by Scots as uninteresting or unimportant. Waste our taxes by all means, so long as you deliver that referendum by the end of 2023 like you promised.

Yeah, about that…

The thing is, no such referendum is going to happen. The UK government won’t be budged on the matter and the SNP won’t go ahead with an “illegal” one because of Catalonia. Sturgeon will at least get another round of constitutional confrontation with Boris Johnson; Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader, will throw another tantrum in the Commons and stage a couple of walkouts. Same old same old.

But after that’s all over with, what will Sturgeon be left with? A £2 million invoice from a consultant and no new ferries. Maybe at that point, after they’ve stopped being distracted by shiny things somewhere off in the distance, Scottish voters will realise that the power to punish failing politicians lies in their hands. They’ve used that power before and they can use it again.