STRANGE days. As one of the placards that graced Scotland’s streets this week put it: “You know it’s bad when it’s protested in St Andrews.” For anyone in need of further amusement after contemplating the cosmic awfulness of the new US President’s travel ban on refugees, I recommend a cutting from The Herald.

It was not, for once, our man Steven Camley who was supplying the giggles but a photographer, Ben Birchall. It was his task to capture the opening moments of the Joint Ministerial Committee (JMC) meeting in Cardiff City Hall on Monday. There they sat, UK ministers led by Theresa May on one side of the table, with the first ministers of the devolved parliaments, including Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, on the other. There was not a smile to be had. Every single one of them looked as though their budgie had just died.

This was the first JMC since Theresa May had said there would be no bespoke deal for Scotland as the UK departs the EU, followed by the Supreme Court ruling that MPs deserved a say on triggering Article 50 but not MSPs. Even for a meeting taking place in January, the room temperature was chilly, verging on freezing.

Scotland’s First Minister duly left three hours later looking, as they do not say in the London papers, “scunnered”. There had been no willingness, she said, to give ground on the Scottish Government’s proposals for staying in the single market. She spoke of the “next few weeks”, leading up to the triggering of Article 50 and the formal start of the Brexit process, as critical. “I’ll do what needs to be done to protect Scotland’s position. We are running out of time for this process. It can’t go on indefinitely and it won’t go on indefinitely.”

Many of those hearing the First Minister, at Holyrood in particular, took this to mean that Ms Sturgeon was gearing up to announce a second Scottish independence referendum, perhaps at the party’s spring conference in the middle of March. By then, the Brexit Bill is expected to have passed through the Commons.

The second reading debate of the EU (Notification on Withdrawal) Bill began yesterday in the Commons, with a vote expected tonight. The hand-to-hand combat starts next week in the Bill’s committee stage when Labour, SNP and other MPs will table amendments. If all goes to Downing Street’s plan, the Bill will be out of the Lords by March 7, well before the March 31 deadline Mrs May has set herself.

With events moving quickly, one can understand why Ms Sturgeon is tempted to fire the starting gun on a second independence referendum. But one can also see her plan backfiring disastrously. How disastrously? David Cameron and his EU referendum comes to mind.

Mr Cameron thought he was right about the timing of his poll. Having won a majority at the General Election, his wizard plan was to get a vote out of the way early on in the Parliament and carry on with what he really wanted to do. It is a measure of Mr Cameron’s ineffectuality that one struggles to know what that was. He felt honour-bound to make good on his referendum promise, not least because he knew that if he did not do so he would be pressed on it every day he remained in Downing Street. He also felt, deep in his gut, that if he put the case for staying in the EU to the British people, and highlighted the dangers of leaving, that they would back him.

To borrow Mrs May’s catchphrase, “Remind you of anyone?” Ms Sturgeon does not have a majority but, like Mr Cameron, she has been speaking of a second independence referendum for a long time; since the last one, indeed, and more particularly since the morning after Mr Cameron lost. She started with a high opening bid, saying the vote represented the kind of “material change” that the party said in its manifesto could trigger a second independence vote. From then on the verbal bids have grown bigger. Thus we arrive at the latest deadline of “a few weeks” for the UK Government to show that, in Ms Sturgeon’s eyes, it is serious about doing a deal that involves Scotland being in the single market after the rest of the UK leaves the EU.

Like Mr Cameron, Ms Sturgeon presumably believes the voters will take her side on the EU. True, Scotland voted 62 per cent to 38 per cent to Remain. But not every Remainer would subsequently vote to leave the UK; and not every Leaver fancies being part of an independent Scotland within the EU. In a Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times at the weekend, one-third of 2014’s Yes voters backed leaving the EU.

Ms Sturgeon would need to make a solid-gold case indeed to persuade them to change their minds about EU membership. The beginnings of that case are forming, starting with warnings about the dangers of sticking with a right-wing Tory government in England, but it is on cold, hard, cash grounds that any second referendum, like the first one, will be decided.

As the Scottish Government’s own figures show, Scotland’s trade with the rUK is worth four times that of its exports to the EU. The SNP could try to swerve round these figures by talking about great new trade opportunities outwith Europe but, again: remind you of anyone?

There are other considerations Ms Sturgeon needs to bear in mind as she makes her decision on whether to twist or stick on second referendum. First, public appetite. In the same Panelbase survey, support for another independence vote before Brexit had been completed had fallen from 43 per cent last June, when Ms Sturgeon put the option on the table, to 27 per cent at present. Overall, 51 per cent did not want a second referendum in the next few years.

A 2017 vote is off the table, so all eyes would look to 2018. Even that would be risky. If Ms Sturgeon did announce a new vote in the next few weeks she would be beginning a campaign that would last for almost two years, at the very time when voters are saying they do not want another poll. Keeping your own voters onside for that long, never mind persuading others to switch, is tough enough at the best of times. The next two years, with economic uncertainty increasing, are not those times. Nor do Scotland’s oft-cited (but not much in evidence in the first referendum) friends in the EU look as though they will be much help.

One Spanish MP, Esteban Gonzales Pons, was reported as saying this week that it was one out, all out when it came to UK membership of the EU and, if an independent Scotland wanted to come back, it would have to join the queue.

The next JMC meeting takes place on Monday. While talks will continue, if only for show, Mrs May does not sound or act like a woman interested in doing any deal that allows Ms Sturgeon to claim a victory. She will quite happily call her bluff. If she does, it is not the ides of March the First Minister should be worried about but the curse of Cameron overconfidence.