I'M getting very bored with writing about how Alex Salmond walks on water – really I am.

It's not natural. As the SNP indulge in their second self-congratulatory conference in six months in Glasgow this weekend, the First Minister's popularity remains unreasonably high. Last month's Ipsos/MORI poll gave Salmond a 58% satisfaction rating and an overall positive rating of 22%. By contrast, David Cameron is minus 28%. And the Scottish opposition party leaders? Don't ask. The SNP remain stubbornly ahead in Scottish voting intentions.

Yes, I know. Opinion polls should be taken but not inhaled. But this consistently high popularity is very rare in politics. Normally at this stage in the life of government an accumulation of divisions, mistakes, personal rivalries, broken promises and scandals rot the integrity and popularity of an administration. Then sheer boredom sets in and the voters look for something new. But Alex Salmond just goes from strength to strength, his Teflon coating as resilient as it was in 2007. Commentators like me, who've been forecasting the end of the Salmond honeymoon, have had to eat their words so often we're starting to enjoy the taste.

Normally only dictators get this kind of voter approval, which has led Labour politicians such as Tom Harris and Lord Foulkes to suggest that "El Presidente" might be getting anti-democratic tendencies. If Vladimir Putin had won an overall majority in a proportionally elected parliament, as Salmond did last May, election monitors would be crying foul. But there was no jiggery-pokery involved. Salmond isn't a dictator, or a political strongman, or a demagogue – he just has an uncanny knack of being popular.

There have been plenty of potential pitfalls: al Megrahi, Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, the banking crisis, local income tax, gay marriage, Brian Souter's donations, the Offensive Behaviour at Football Bill. Any one of these issues could have got out of hand – but somehow they didn't. Last week saw a bonsai scandal when one of the First Minister's advisers, Joan McAlpine, said in a newspaper column that Scotland is in an "abusive" relationship with England (that's with England doing the wife-beating in case you're wondering). The analogy was said by some to be offensive to real victims of domestic violence, but the row fizzled out at First Minister's Question Time as Labour's Johann Lamont failed to hit the right note of indignation.

And look at all the things that went Salmond's way in conference week. The Scottish Tories performed a U-turn on alcohol pricing, falling into line belatedly with the SNP policy they had rejected as unfair and unworkable. Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the influential constitutional authority who taught David Cameron politics at Oxford, embarrassed the PM by coming out in favour of precisely the two-question referendum he has rejected. Then the Scottish Trades Union Congress said that it too backed an additional question, should one emerge from the supporters of devo max/plus/minus/squared. The unions also backed Salmond on the referendum timing – 2014 – and votes for 16-year-olds.

Then we learned that the Green Investment Bank (GIB) is to set up shop in Edinburgh to promote Scotland's renewable energy industry. Some commentators of the curmudgeon tendency have argued that the GIB is somehow tainted because it was handed to Scotland as a sop to keep us in the Union. But this was surely one of the rare occasions when London actually lived up to its promise to disperse such public bodies out of the congested south-east of England. I don't recall people complaining that the Olympics are tainted because they're in London. The FM naturally is pleased as punch at this vindication of his claim that Scotland is a global green-energy hub.

The row about the Trident nuclear deterrent looked as if it was about to go critical last week when defence chiefs insisted that there was simply nowhere else the system could go than Coulport. The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested last month that Scotland might even be charged billions for relocating the missiles. But the impression I get is that this issue is not moving Hammond's way. Military chiefs seem to appreciate, rather better than the Westminster government, that this is a problem for the UK rather than the SNP. Scotland has had this system for 50 years now, and there would be a strong moral justification for a future Scottish Government to say that it was time England had its turn. It would be unacceptable, as the Commons Security Committee all but conceded last week, to impose Trident on an independent Scotland against the clear wishes of Scottish voters.

David Cameron told his own backbenchers in January Britain could lose its seat at the UN Security Council if Scotland left the Union and Trident were scrapped. This is debatable, but it would certainly cause a problem for the UK. The obvious solution might be to scrap Trident, since it is a costly system designed to obliterate Russian cities which is now without conceivable targets and which violates the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it seems unlikely any Tory or Labour-led government in Westminster will give up this virility symbol lightly. This could be a massive bargaining chip for Salmond, should Salmond choose to play it.

So when are normal politics going to resume? When is Salmond going to get his comeuppance? Will I still be writing columns like this in 2014? Well, there are dark clouds aplenty on the horizon, with unemployment, debt, and council cuts, but I don't see anything yet that poses a real threat. The SNP probably won't win Glasgow in the council elections, but no-one really expects them to. Presumably the Unionist parties will eventually get their act together on devolution-plus, and the polls continue to forecast that Salmond will lose the independence referendum if they do.

But I'm beginning to think Salmond could even weather the set-back of a lost referendum vote in 2014. The First Minister would switch from campaigning for independence to sponsoring devolution-plus. In the 2015/16 Scottish election campaign the strapline might read: "Vote SNP to make Westminster honour its promises." An SNP-LibDem coalition would be one likely outcome of that election – assuming there are any Scottish LibDems left. Certainly, there seems no obvious reason why Scots would stop voting for the SNP in Holyrood just because they lost the referendum on independence.

Salmond wins even if he loses. It's just not fair.