Alex Salmond’s Alba party has failed to ignite the heather, at least so far. There’s five weeks to go and anything could happen, but last week’s opinion poll showing doesn’t suggest that Scottish voters were waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to back the former SNP leader and deliver his super-majority. Yesterday’s man, say the SNP gleefully, with no tomorrow.

But whatever happens, Salmond’s intervention has opened up rifts within the independence movement and shed further doubt on Nicola Sturgeon’s commitment to an early referendum. Indeed, in rejecting Salmond’s idea of a two-party supermajority as “gaming the system” she may have skewered indyref2.

After May 6, if her pro-independence majority is composed, as looks likely, of SNP constituency and Green list MSPs, it will be hard to claim this as a new mandate for a referendum.

Boris Johnson will just quote her own words back at her. Holyrood’s AMS system was designed precisely to prevent any one party securing an overall majority. Alex Salmond was able to beat d’Hondt in 2011 only because of a unique set of circumstances.

However, I do not subscribe to the view that the First Minister has given up on Scottish independence. It is in her DNA as much as it is in Alex Salmond’s. However, her body language in last week’s BBC debate, in which she was hectored and harried over the timing of indyref2, indicated her discomfort with the whole question.

She clearly has other things on her mind – the pandemic for one – and has now shifted the rhetoric on independence to

take that into account. Independence is no longer to be seen as a necessary condition for a successful recovery, but something only to be considered “after the crisis is over”, as she put it. That crisis could last for some years yet.

The Covid economic crisis has not yet begun. There is every likelihood that, after the lockdown and furlough is history, we will wake up to find that Scotland has entered a deep recession, exacerbated by Brexit, with little prospect of immediate recovery beyond a temporary boost from the middle classes spending the lockdown money they’ve saved.

The Scottish economy was lagging behind the rest of the UK before Covid. Structural problems are going to be revealed as UK Government support is withdrawn.

As they say in America, when the tide goes out you find out who’s not wearing a bathing suit.

In those circumstances, with unemployment rising, would the First Minister really want to ignite a divisive referendum campaign even if she could? As I say, it’s too soon to write off Alba, but one message could be that, while Scots may be increasingly attracted to the concept of independence, they may not be in the market for it right now. Lord make me free, but not yet.

Only if you are a radical, an insurgent, a risk-taker – yes, a gambler – does independence really makes sense, at least right now.

A politician like Alex Salmond doesn’t care about polls or the precautionary principle; he makes his own history. Salmond is right that only a mass, popular movement could make the independence cause become unanswerable. It would require big street demonstrations, court actions, civil disobedience. History would need to be placed on fast forward, as it was in Ireland at the start of the last century. That’s a risky road.

Nicola Sturgeon is not a

risk-taker, not a revolutionary, and recoils from fighting talk and division. It’s all too testosterone-fuelled for her. Most middle-class Scots share her risk aversion.

One of the abiding themes of Scottish politics over the past 30 years has been voters’ enthusiasm for gradations of home rule that always stop short of actual independence.

It might be that Ms Sturgeon’s very caution is part of her popularity. She is intensely Scottish, hostile to English Tories, but she can be relied upon not to do anything daft.

The independence case is anyway in deep trouble. In 2014, Salmond managed to persuade 45 per cent of Scots to vote Yes but only after it was made clear that it would not mean a border with England, or losing the pound, or even losing the Queen. Both Scotland and England were assumed to be remaining in the EU. That has all changed.

Nicola Sturgeon has avoided discussion of the mechanics of independence post-Brexit, preferring to stick to generalities about how Scots need to take their own decisions and not be under dictation from Brexit Tories.

But she knows, and everyone in her Government knows, that the situation is very different to 2014. Last week’s report from the Institute for Government underlined in red difficulties that simply can’t be ignored.

It is true that the act of joining the European Union might only take two to four years – the blink of an eye in Brussels terms. But disaggregating the UK would take much longer. Scotland would have to be fully independent of the UK and that would take at least five years going on the Brexit experience.

The Institute reckons that we’d be looking at a decade of complex negotiations before Scotland became a member of the EU.

The idea that Brussels might allow some kind of halfway house, letting Scotland join while it was still part of the UK, is a non-starter. It was something the EU refused to consider even before the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Recent problems with that mean Brussels will run a mile from Ireland-style anomalies.

So there would inevitably be a hard trade border. Scotland may not have to join the euro, at least not immediately, but it will have to be fully independent to fulfil the terms of EU accession.

It could not be an independent country if it kept the pound and had monetary policy decided by the Bank of England.

Nicola Sturgeon is one of the most gifted politicians Scotland has ever produced. She is a trained lawyer and has watched the manifold difficulties that followed the Brexit vote.

She knows that for independence to succeed it would require a huge level of commitment from the Scottish people – a commitment that doesn’t as yet exist.

Even if she could secure the essential Section 30 Order from Westminster, there’s no guarantee that Yes would win.

At best, it might be a divided result, perhaps the inverse of 2014, with a narrow victory for Yes. But that would land her with the nightmare of negotiating independence for a divided nation. The Unionist minority would demand a repeat referendum after the separation agreement with the UK is negotiated. Since that was what Nicola Sturgeon called for on Brexit, it would be hard for her to refuse.

All these issues crowd into the mind of a politician like the First Minister.

She is too aware of the downside, too conscious of the damage of division and conflict. That is her great political weakness, but it is also her electoral strength.

Her aversion to populism and civil disobedience makes it difficult for her to make history. On the other hand, it may be that Scots are happy for her not to – at least for now.