LATE December is a dry period for stories, but the days leading up to Hogmanay allow journalists to step into a time machine for a few hours.

Fifteen year old Scottish Cabinet papers become available for inspection, unlike south of the Border where a more stringent 30 year rule applies.

The latest batch covers 2003, when Labour’s Jack McConnell was First Minister, John Swinney was SNP leader, and Alex Salmond languished in semi-retirement.

It was also the boom years of devolution. Increases in spending, made possible by strong economic growth, led to chunky rises in Holyrood’s block grant. An expansion of the public sector was possible.

McConnell entered 2003 in sound political health. Free personal care for the elderly had been passed and was on its way. The NHS and schools were enjoying record funding increases. The Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition was comfortably re-elected.

Devolution in 2018 is unrecognisable from those days. The SNP has been in power for over a decade and the funding settlements are tighter. However, the accretion of financial powers to Holyrood has given the Nationalist administration an unprecedented range of options to raise resources. It can be done if there is a will to do so.

Having covered Holyrood for over a decade, I feel confident in saying that 2018 was the worst year for public service delivery since the creation of the Parliament. At best, Nicola Sturgeon’s record merits a C-minus. Most Governments in Europe would be staring into the electoral abyss after putting in a similar performance.

Consider the evidence. When she succeeded Salmond in 2014, Sturgeon insisted that closing the educational attainment gap for poorer children was her top priority. Then the language shifted. The SNP spoke of making “significant progress” towards this goal, after which it was watered down further to “demonstrable” progress. Now the Government has settled for closing the “poverty related” attainment gap.

Policy-wise it has been little better. Education Secretary John Swinney was forced to shelve his “governance” bill before the summer recess due to a lack of political support. His plans for primary one assessments were voted down by MSPs in the autumn and some councils have refused to implement the initiative.

As of December, the gap was still huge. Fewer than three out of five pupils (59%) leaving primary school in the poorest areas were meeting the necessary standards in literacy. This was in contrast to 83% of children in the most affluent communities. Swinney said the gap had narrowed “slightly”.

The Government’s performance on the NHS was even less impressive. After over a decade of SNP control, the health service suffers from shortages in key staffing areas, while “statutory” waiting time targets are routinely missed due to the strain. Shona Robison, appointed Health Secretary in 2014, paid for the crisis with her job and left her post in the summer.

Her successor Jeane Freeman’s “clear the decks” strategy revealed the scale of the task facing the NHS. In October, she announced that around £150m of emergency loans provided to failing health boards would be written off. Weeks later, Freeman gave the NHS nearly three years to hit the targets set by previous SNP Ministers. Audit Scotland concluded that the NHS was "not financially sustainable” in its current form.

Rail passengers are also unlikely to remember 2018 as a vintage year. Some of the criticism was misplaced – many of the cancellations and delays were caused by Network Rail, not ScotRail – but in the eyes of the public the service is unreliable and a rip off. Echoing Freeman’s approach, Transport Secretary Michael Matheson agreed to waive the operator’s performance benchmarks until next June. Or, as a leading trade unionist put it, he gave ScotRail “carte blanche to fail”.

April’s tax changes, brought about by Finance Secretary Derek Mackay’s Budget, symbolise the SNP Government’s looming problem with voters. On one reading of his actions, Mackay increased taxes on higher earners and steered a different course from Theresa May's Tories. His left flank approved.

However, the Government justified the tax rises by arguing that higher earners benefited from “social contract” policies such as free higher education and no prescription charges. The flaw is that these policies already existed. Mackay has asked Scots to pay more for a deteriorating quality of public service.

Sturgeon’s Government made some progress in 2018. The “best start” grant, worth £600 for a parent’s first child, will provide much-needed support for low income families. Legislation criminalising psychological domestic abuse was groundbreaking. And the introduction of minimum unit pricing on alcohol was testament to the First Minister’s determination.

But her Cabinet reshuffle in June puts these policies into perspective. If her Government was successful and on track to build up public services, why would she despatch three of her Cabinet Secretaries to the backbenches? It was a sign of weakness, not strength.

All Governments that have been in power for 11 years show signs of wear and tear. At the same juncture, Margaret Thatcher’s colleagues were plotting to topple their iconic leader. Voters had made up their minds about Gordon Brown after a similar period of Labour rule. Sturgeon is not yet in this territory.

Brexit, ironically, explains why the First Minister is not limping towards inevitable defeat in 2021. Regardless of the SNP Government’s dismal record on public services, it is nothing compared to the daily shambles inflicted on the public by the Tory administration south of the border. Holyrood is, by contrast, a relative side-show.

The UK's botched departure from the European Union has played to the strengths of the Nationalists. No political party in Western Europe handles constitutional strife better than the SNP. For much of the year, ministers accused May of a “power grab” over the EU Withdrawal Bill. Although the Supreme Court eventually sided with the UK Government, the narrative was set in Edinburgh.

Opinions polls continue to reflect the SNP’s dominance, but this is largely down to Salmond, not Sturgeon. While Scotland used to be a country primarily based on a centre-left versus centre-right split, Salmond’s legacy as First Minister was to split Scotland down constitutional lines. If the independence movement is animated, the SNP can always be expected to poll around 40% of the vote.

Expect 2019 to be another year of constitutional melodrama at Holyrood. The SNP Government will step up its criticism of Brexit and Sturgeon will announce her intentions on a second independence referendum. But the Government cannot hide from its domestic record forever. Brexit may have provided cover, but Sturgeon’s administration is showing signs of crashing against the rocks.