DO you remember how, when it seemed Donald Trump might take a jaunt to one of his Scottish golf courses to avoid being in the US for President Biden’s inauguration, Nicola Sturgeon jumped on her high horse and announced that Trump would be banned from entering her country?
Two years on and it is hard to distinguish between Trump and Sturgeon’s SNP.
While Trump was defending himself against various charges in a New York courtroom this week, Scottish police investigating the alleged disappearance of £600,000 from SNP campaign funds taped off Sturgeon’s home like a murder scene, and erected a blue tent on her lawn.
They also arrested her husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, although they later released him pending further investigations.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh — at least if it were not so serious for Scotland and the United Kingdom.
The corpse in this “murder” scene was that of the SNP itself.
What a dramatic implosion for a party and a leader which for most of the past decade has been posing as morally superior to the government in Westminster.
Look at the shambles in Boris Johnson’s Downing Street, Sturgeon invited Scots to think — over and over again.
That is what independence could deliver you from.
Instead, voters are left contemplating an even worse mess at Holyrood.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
The SNP tried to make itself out to be the antithesis of what it thought the Tories to be.
The party was, in its own mind, modern, progressive, inclusive — not to mention underpinned by science.
Where the Westminster government was happy to see Covid run amok, Sturgeon would have us believe that a sensible SNP administration had all but eradicated the disease north of the border.
What delight she took in banning people travelling from England to Scotland, and closing Scotland’s schools for even longer than England’s.
Except that Scotland ended up with a similar death rate to the rest of the United Kingdom.
On drugs, her government tried to distinguish itself by adopting a policy of treating addiction as a health issue rather than a crime — and ended up with the highest death rate from drugs in Europe.
Scotland’s schools and hospitals under-performed — in spite of Scotland enjoying the benefits of the Barnett Formula, which means that for every pound spent on public services in England, £1.26 is available in Scotland.
Then, of course, came the fiasco of the Gender Identity Bill, which Sturgeon tried to present as a high moral issue — until faced with a male rapist trying to gain a place in a women’s jail by changing gender.
Almost everyone could foresee that — except Sturgeon.
But anyone who thinks the SNP can escape from a long, dark night under its new leader, Humza Yousaf, is fooling themselves.
Yousaf, Sturgeon’s anointed successor, makes her look like a great achiever.
Having failed in every ministerial job he has held, presiding over everything from a bungled ferry-building contract to long hospital queues, the first thing he did as leader was to try to demote one of the few SNP politicians who really does have talent — his defeated leadership rival Kate Forbes.
Anyone with an ounce of sense can tell that when a party has imploded like the SNP in recent weeks, the first thing a new leader needs to do is try to build bridges between its different wings.
Instead, Yousaf has taken the approach of the saboteurs in Bridge Over The River Kwai — and blown the whole thing up.
The speed of the SNP’s collapse is truly astonishing.
Just two months ago Sturgeon was trying to do battle with the Westminster government over her insistence on holding a second independence referendum in a decade — fooling herself that this time around Scots would come up with the “correct” decision.
But it isn’t just SNP poll ratings that are collapsing.
Support for independence is crumbling, too — not that there has ever been a sustained majority for it.
It would be very easy for Unionists to laugh at the SNP’s plight, but it is also terribly sad.
Twenty five years ago, Scots voted for devolution, hoping it would bring the country a new sense of confidence and purpose.
Instead, Holyrood ended up looking like the seat of a one-party state.
The SNP seemed to think it was Scotland — with its activists trying to make enemies of anyone who opposed independence.
For Rishi Sunak, the SNP implosion has brought an unexpected breakthrough.
No longer are the Tories looking like Britain’s most shambolic political party.
Yet if the SNP vote collapses at the next General Election, as seems quite likely, it could well be Keir Starmer who benefits.
That may well bring problems of its own for the entire United Kingdom.
But in the meantime we can at least be grateful that the SNP’s unhealthy domination of Scottish politics is over.
We will have proper political debate again — rather than moralising from a flawed leader facing far too little in the way of opposition.
