“So who WOULD you vote for?” I asked one of my oldest political friends, who’d worked for nearly two decades at a senior level in the SNP. “Nobody, certainly not this lot”. He meant the present leadership of the Scottish National Party and Nicola Sturgeon in particular.

It was confirmation of just how traumatised the party has been by the whole Salmond affair. Yet, my contact is no Salmondite, and has never been particularly fond of the former First Minister. He seemed more concerned that the SNP has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Nicola clan, a Peronist personality cult.

Also, that the protestations about an imminent referendum on independence are an insult to voters’ intelligence. No-one seriously believes that we’re having a referendum this year or next year, except perhaps Alex Salmond and the Albanists. So what is the SNP asking people to vote for on May 6?

Not education: the attainment gap’s almost as wide as ever. The economy’s being run, and paid for, by Rishi Sunak. Brexit is history. The Gender Recognition Act? Er, hardly. Perhaps voters will turn out to express their gratitude for the Hate Crime Bill that criminalises table talk? Even that four per cent pay award to nurses just reminds the vast majority of Scottish workers that they’ve had nothing recently and can expect a lot less.

As Holyrood departed last week for the most unusual election campaign in history, there was an aching void at the heart of the SNP’s appeal to voters. The short answer to why people should vote for them is, as always: independence. More specifically that a massive vote for Nicola Sturgeon will force Westminster to relent and grant a repeat referendum on independence.

But even if you believe that, the SNP does not look or feel like a party that is preparing for an imminent referendum. Where is the organisation on the ground? Where is the funding? Where is the White Paper explaining how independence would happen, post-Brexit? Where is the Section 30 Order that Nicola Sturgeon insists would be essential to legitimise the vote? Above all: where is the momentum?

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Many independence activists believe that the SNP leadership has become too comfortable in their careers to risk anything as divisive and revolutionary as independence. Minister have their cars and their pet projects. MSPs are making very good money for their three-day parliamentary week. Why rock the boat? Political leaders’ first loyalty is not to the voters, but to their own troops, to keep them in jobs.

If it all went wrong, the SNP could lose one-third or more of its seats – as happened in 2017 after Nicola Sturgeon’s last attempt to light the blue touchpaper on indyref2. Everyone knows that Boris Johnson’s answer to a request for a Section 30 order will be the same as Theresa May’s: “now is not the time”.

The polls are remarkably good for a party that has been in power for 14 years, and has lately been the target of multiple sleaze allegations, by no means all of them emanating from Alex Salmond. Support for independence has softened a bit but it still looks in positive territory. The SNP and Nicola Sturgeon in particular have emerged largely unscathed from the trials and tribulations of recent months.

The nationalist blogosphere, and the press, has been appalled by the cack-handed censorship by the Crown Office, and the failure of anyone to resign over the “catastrophic” errors in the Salmond investigation identified by the Court of Session and the Holyrood inquiry.

But the conflict with Alex Salmond has so far done little political damage. Opinion polls suggest Nicola Sturgeon is as popular as ever, and remains streets ahead of her bete noire.

The opposition parties are Nicola Sturgeon’s biggest asset right now. What opposition, you might ask? Labour has a new and untried leader in Anas Sarwar; the Tories’ best performer, Ruth Davidson, is off to the House of Lords; the Scottish Greens are a wholly-owned subsidiary. Alex Salmond’s bid for the list vote may or may not succeed, but it hardly represents an existential threat to the SNP’s hold on power.

One of the benefits of the Salmond saga is that it has diverted attention from mismanagement by the Scottish Government on issues like the failures of Ferguson Marine Shipyard and BiFab.

In 2016, Nicola Sturgeon said that closing the educational attainment gap would be her “defining mission” and that she wished to be judged upon her success in narrowing it.

Yet only last week Audit Scotland confirmed that the attainment gap remains wide and is going to get a lot wider because of the pandemic.

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Nobody, apart from gender activists, seems to like the Hate Crime Act with its creepy criminalisation of what people say in the privacy of their own homes. Like banning smacking and the named persons scheme, these measures appeal to the various lobby groups that the SNP has herded into its big tent, but are not great vote winners. Allowing trans people to declare themselves as women without medical intervention has even divided the LGBTQIA+ community.

Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to deliver this reform, but it’s a potential vote-loser with feminists, and mothers worried about male-bodied transwomen entering their daughters’ changing rooms. Expect to hear nothing whatever about the Gender Recognition Act before polling day.

In the past four years, the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon has been almost as much anti-Brexit as pro-independence. The First Minister paraded prominently with Remain marches (that selfie with Alastair Campbell) even as she was pointedly avoiding independence marches in Scotland. But Brexit is not the issue it was. As Britain races ahead in the vaccine programme, Europe is beginning to look like a hostile power.

Vaccine nationalism has gripped Brussels, and led EC president, Ursula von der Leyen, to make wild threats of launching a vaccine trade war. There has long been a substantial section of the SNP that never liked the European Union. Many more are asking why Scotland would want to join an organisation that appears to be emulating Donald Trump.

The SNP has yet to level with Scottish voters about the difference in the independence project post-Brexit.

This campaign may be the moment when issues like currency and the hard border with England become real issues and not just debunked elements of Project Fear. The EU and the UK are playing border hardball in Northern Ireland. It would be naïve to expect Brussels to give Scotland the special regulatory treatment accorded to that province.

Ms Sturgeon will no doubt try to make this an election about Boris Johnson and invite voters to express their visceral hostility toward this paragon of English elitism.

There’s a lot not to like, certainly, with the new asylum rules and the early mistakes in the pandemic. Voters still believe Nicola Sturgeon handled coronavirus better.

But hating Boris isn’t enough any more. This election is going to be more difficult for the SNP than they realise, and not just because Salmond is back. Polls are good now, but remember 2003 ...