Nicola Sturgeon will be lucky to survive a scandal engulfing the SNP

If what is currently happening in Scottish public life were occurring in Dagestan we should not hesitate to dismiss it as a failed state. Apologies for returning so soon to events on the even more dysfunctional side of Hadrian’s Wall, but the accelerating pace of the Sturgeon government’s death spiral requires recording.

The polite “Have a good weekend” which colleagues presumably directed at First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at close of play last Friday evening must have assumed an ironic texture as that weekend unfolded. On Saturday she learned that, following a complaint by Alex Salmond, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) had launched a criminal investigation into the leak to a tabloid newspaper of the fact that a Scottish government inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations against Salmond had resulted in referral of the complaints to the police.

Under section 170 of the Data Protection Act that leak would be a criminal offence if someone “knowingly or recklessly” obtained or disclosed personal data without the agreement of the “data controller”, in this instance the Scottish government. That someone is now the target of a criminal inquiry. That was the news that soured Sturgeon’s Saturday.

On Sunday, the First Minister finally yielded to mounting pressure and referred herself to a watchdog panel on ministerial ethics composed of Dame Elish Angiolini, former lord advocate, and James Hamilton, former director of public prosecutions in the Irish Republic. This is a sorry state of affairs for the First Minister.

Her conduct was already questionable insofar as she failed to notify the Permanent Secretary of her meeting with Alex Salmond on 2 April last year until 6 June, the day before her second meeting with her predecessor. Now, however, Salmond’s supporters are claiming Sturgeon knew about the charges against Salmond earlier than 2 April. The Times has reported claims from the Salmond camp that Sturgeon’s chief of staff Liz Loyd telephoned Salmond on 6 March 2018 to warn him against standing if another election was called because of the allegations against him.

Nicola Sturgeon’s spokesman has now issued a statement saying: “This appears to be an attempt to smear the first minister. Suggestions by Mr Salmond’s ‘insiders’ that the first minister knew about the investigation before April 2 are not true. The suggestion put to Ms Sturgeon’s chief of staff by the Times, that she knew of complaints when she met someone who could be described as an intermediary for Alex Salmond on 6 March, is also not true.”

This is the point at which all such scandals enter lethal territory: precise dates and specific issues alleged by one side and formally denied by the other. From today, the Sturgeon/Salmond conflict is in sudden death mode. The factual discrediting of a claim or denial by either side will be fatal and such revelations have a habit of occurring. Salmond, being out of office, has less to lose.

This war, as always happens in such scandals, is losing sight of the original issue and it is subsequent gaffes and bad practices that have assumed toxic potential. It is difficult to see Nicola Sturgeon surviving this implosion of her government. The ramifications of inquiries and investigations will run on for more than a year. It could not have happened at a worse time for the First Minister, who had hoped to escape the consequences of her failed stewardship of Scottish governance by grandstanding over Brexit and a second independence referendum.

If this scandal were assailing a highly successful Scottish administration that had energized enterprise, improved education and streamlined healthcare, the respect and goodwill it would have commanded might just have been sufficient to enable it to survive the crisis. The reverse is the case. Scottish education, once a global benchmark, is now an oxymoron. The last PISA results, the OECD ranking of educational attainment, were described by educationalist Professor Lindsay Paterson as the worst news for Scottish education in 30 years.

In 2000 Scotland ranked sixth for maths; by 2015 it had slumped to fifteenth. Scotland’s “Curriculum for Excellence” is a sick joke. Not to worry: the government has a reform plan under which maths, like every other subject, will be taught from an “LGBT perspective”. That should send Scottish youngsters romping up the league tables next time round. Devolved Scottish governance is not about getting a grip on intractable problems and sorting them out by sheer effort: it is about ideological grandstanding, virtue signalling and fantasy economics.

Under SNP rule the divorce of government from reality has been aggravated. Independence, despite its decisive repudiation by the Scottish electorate, remains the sole preoccupation of a failed government. Nicola Sturgeon is presiding over a moribund administration that is now split into two venomously warring factions.

The spectacle of separatism’s two big beasts trampling the jungle in a death struggle heralds the Götterdammerung of the SNP. It is incompetent and bereft of ideas except for independence, which Scotland rejects. The endgame could take a long time to play out, perhaps even until the next Scottish elections. But the outcome is no longer in doubt, with the scorpion stinging itself to death. Recent developments prompt the wild surmise: what more could go wrong for Nicola Sturgeon? An awful lot, is the answer.