Tom Gordon

WITH Nicola Sturgeon away tickling America, it was left to John Swinney to cop it at FMQs.

The Deputy First Minister knew exactly what was in the pipeline.

Once upon a time (2014), it seemed there was more oil than water in the North Sea, and the SNP ran round predicting riches for all after independence.

Now, with prices halved, you'd be lucky to dress a salad with the national output, and Mr Swinney's vision of a second oil bonanza inspires only hollow laughter.

Hence the nickname, Boom Boom.

With a new report confirming two-thirds of North Sea operators axing projects, Labour's Kezia Dugdale asked when the government would publish its latest oil forecasts.

They used to emerge every six to eight months; it's now 13 months since the last one.

Obviously not until we know the implications of the tax changes in March's budget, said Boom Boom seriously, meaning deep into summer recess when I'm a thousand miles away.

"I did not hear a date there," noted Ms Dugdale. "Once upon a time you could not move for SNP oil bulletins. Since the collapse in the oil price, we have had nothing but radio silence."

Luckily, Labour had done its own analysis, she went on, holding up an inky fagpacket.

"I hear cries of 'Mickey Mouse'," she squeaked over SNP jeering, but the parliament's own number-crunchers had signed it off, honest.

You'd need oil at $200 a barrel to balance Scotland's books under the SNP plan for full fiscal autonomy, she said, so would the Nats back an independent commission to examine it?

At the first whiff of FFA, Mr Swinney went into 'Hulk smash' mode.

Labour banged on about this before the election and had its "worst performance for 90 years, with a haemorrhage of the its vote and the loss of 40 of its 41 seats," he raged.

As for a commission, it was a Red-Blue plot, a "continuation of the Better Together alliance".

But Ms Dugdale keep coming.

Amid "all that anger and posturing" was a finance secretary "running scared of the consequences of his own policy... of some £7.6bn of cuts."

Such negativity, tutted the DFM, lobbing in a random reference to splits in Scottish Labour.

LibDem Willie Rennie asked drily what new MP Tommy Sheppard had meant when he said FFA would be "a disaster", a neon-lit gaffe that has given the SNP grief all week.

Why, said the DFM, Mr Sheppard was only explaining the SNP manifesto, the bit that said FFA "would have to take place over time".

The chamber tittered in embarrassment at such mince.

The truth, said Mr Rennie, was that the SNP was all over the place on FFA, for it one minute, against the next.

"It started as the hokey cokey and has ended up as pass the parcel," he sniffed.

Mr Swinney grabbed the phrase like a lifebelt.

"The one thing we could say about the Scottish Liberal parliamentary group in the Commons is that it could not play pass the parcel," he shot back.

Even the LibDem leader laughed at that one. Boom boom, indeed.