Nicola Sturgeon’s statement on Brexit and independence was both a tactical coup and a strategic dud.

If provides impatient party activists and Yes campaigners with plenty to ponder. 

There will be a Holyrood bill for another referendum, a fresh request to the UK government for extra powers, and a Citizens’ Assembly on the future of Scotland. 

Ms Sturgeon said she wanted a fresh vote in this parliament to escape Brexit.

It gets her through this weekend’s SNP conference, and buys off the Greens, who have recently been acting as pesky insurgents to the SNP establishment.

The new bill is also a political necessity. 

Legislative, campaign and electoral considerations mean the FM has to crank up the machinery for a vote this summer, or it will be too late to hold it before the Holyrood election in May 2021. 

However, the legislation is essentially symbolic unless the UK Government decides to give it teeth, and Theresa May has already ruled that out. 

As Ms Sturgeon conceded, the bill cannot actually deliver a legally watertight referendum unless Westminster transfers extra powers under Section 30 of the Scotland Act. 

Before the 2014 referendum, Westminster passed a Section 30 order, then Holyrood passed the legislation. This time, Ms Sturgeon is trying to do it the other way around.

She is putting the legislation in place first, and will then ask for a Section 30 order. 

But it is an order that will never come, and she knows it.

Her “bill to nowhere” is a public relations device. 

She wants London’s opposition to it to be an advert for independence, a symbol of how Westminster is again prepared to ignore the will of Holyrood. But it could equally become a memorial to her own impotence and failure to win an SNP majority in 2016.

There is another risk.

The SNP faces a test of national opinion in one month, with the European elections.

You could hear the opposition polishing their slogans as they responded to Ms Sturgeon’s statement.

“Enough is enough,” said the Tories. “Make it stop,” said the LibDems. 

They will repeating that all the way to May 23.

Ms Sturgeon has two MEPs, and wants a third. If she fails to get one, her critics will blame her push for independence, and her short-term fix may not look so good after all.