OH to have been a fly on the chandelier in Buckingham Palace yesterday as the two Queens of Scots finally faced each other.

Was there a frisson of rivalry between Nicola Sturgeon and Mrs Windsor? Or did the Queen purr at assurances the monarchy is still safe with the SNP?

Mr Salmond reputedly got on famously with Her Majesty, not least because they had a common passion for horses. I don't think Ms Sturgeon will be trading racing tips or chatting about the form book. With 60,000 acres, the Queen is one of the biggest land owners in Scotland and liable to be targeted by the First Minister's land reforms. Will Her Maj be hit for business rates on all that huntin' shootin' and fishin'?

Probably not. Balmoral is classed as part of the Crown Estate and will be devolved under the Smith reforms. In which case Ms Sturgeon will technically be in charge of the noble pile. She has reportedly refused to contribute directly to the upkeep of the Royal Household from Crown Estate revenues, leading Conservative organs to cry "class war". Well, about time.

Of course we never learn what happens at these Royal tete a tetes because they always take place behind a cloak of secrecy, one suspects to conceal the banality of what is actually said. It is the fact of the meeting itself, the theatre, that is important. The Establishment is beginning to wrap itself around the First Minister, as it does all new political leaders, with titles, obscure rituals and membership of a pre-democratic institution, the Privy Council.

The Privy Council is an unelected body of senior politicians, present and past, which is supposed to advise the Queen on matters of state but acts as a kind of inner cabinet of the UK. Ms Sturgeon had to swear an oath yesterday never to disclose what happens in Privy Council. It is part of the freemasonry of state.

The ruling class is very good at buying off radicals, turning them into domestic pets. Labour politicians were particularly susceptible to the subtle combination of ingratiation and threat which awaited them when they arrived, blinking at the Palace of Westminster. Ms Sturgeon has never been an MP and, for the first time for an SNP leader, never will be.

Instead, Mr Salmond has been sent south to keep that end of the movement going while she concentrates on keeping her roadshow going in Scotland. He might even have a reunion with the Her Majesty if things pan out as planned. It is still left to the Queen, at least in theory, to decide on coalition governments in our antiquated constitution.

If there is a hung parliament after the general election, might Mr Salmond be one of those invited to Buckingham Palace to be consulted on whether a stable government can be constructed out of the various Green, SNP, Ukip and LibDem fragments that will be part of the post election horse-trading between Labour and the Tories? Who knows.

But the SNP leaders would do well to start playing down all this royal hobnobbing in London. Back in Scotland, the cracks are beginning to show in the putative Yes Alliance that was supposed to keep the spirit of the referendum alive for the forthcoming general election campaign. As this paper reported yesterday, the Greens are feeling grumpy and the left are feeling left out as the SNP consolidates its grip on Scotland.

The Scottish Socialist Party leader, Colin Fox, claimed the SNP have blocked proposals to field joint candidates in the forthcoming general election, the better to maximise the anti-Labour vote. There was much talk after the referendum of how the SNP might stand down to let the Greens take a seat or two, but that seems to have died as well. As has speculation that prominent women like the journalist Lesley Riddoch, were going to stand as independents with tacit SNP backing.

It's more difficult to break the party system than it looks.

The SNP, not surprisingly, think their first responsibility is to maximise their own vote not that of other parties. Was the Yes campaign then simply an SNP front all along? Well, yes of course it was, in one sense at least. The Scottish National Party were always going to be the ones mainly to benefit from the independence campaign, not the left or the Greens.

But I don't think it is actually fair or accurate to say the SNP blocked a Yes Alliance. From my experience of speaking to many of the Yes groups like Common Weal, Women for Independence, National Collective etc, there was very little enthusiasm for a continuing Yes Alliance. They all wanted to do their own thing.

They said they wanted the "grass roots" to remain in charge. To promote a new kind of bottom up politics that would not be linked existing political parties and institutions like charities, civic groups, trades unions and what-have-you in the way the Scottish Constitutional Convention was in the past.

The left wing parties in the Radical Independence Campaign were always wary too of being part of any "popular front" - a hate phrase on the far left - which would mean they had to support policies on corporation tax and council tax which their members opposed. They could hardly expect the SNP to accept their policy agenda.

The SNP's concession to inter-party fraternity was to relax its membership rules to allow new members to stand for election without having to wait for a probationary year as was the case before. But they still wanted candidates supported by the SNP to put "SNP" somewhere on the ballot papers. Frankly, the SNP held all the cards and it was never going to hand over seats willy nilly to individuals who would have radically different manifesto pledges, like a £10 minimum wage.

The Radical Independence Campaign, which gathered 3,000 at its conference in Glasgow last month, has been left in a difficult place. RIC decided not to form its own radical party, as had been proposed, on the model of Spain's Podemos or Greece's Syriza. Many of its members felt the most effective use of their votes would be to support the SNP in defeating sitting Labour MPs. Which makes a lot of electoral sense but left RIC electorally redundant.

My own view is that this Yes Alliance talk was a distraction from the real issues. There's been too much electoral jostling and political narcissism. What should have been top of the agenda after the referendum was the creation of a broad home rule movement that could have brought in many No voters who want a federal Scotland, and could perhaps be persuaded for independence, but did't want to be members of the SNP.

Where do they go now?

By allowing the SNP to dominate, and being intoxicated with radical exclusivity, the campaign formerly known as Yes has failed to meet the challenge of electoral reality. Independence can never be won without the support of the middle classes, older voters and women who were not persuaded by the colourful Yes campaign. They may not be great enthusiasts for the UK monarchy, but nor are they entirely convinced yet by Queen Nicola the First.