OKAY, Nicola. I will vote for you next time around. I know I’ve said in the past the chances of me voting SNP were as likely as BoJo developing rampant self-awareness, that I have raging misgiving about the SNP’s economic strategies, lack of clarity of intent etc, etc .

But I’m going to push all that aide. All you have to do is tackle dementia. Or rather the evil, iniquitous, life-sapping, pernicious, family-wrecking social policy in place whereby families have to sell their homes to pay for care.

All you have to do is put an end to a system whereby dementia victims and their loved ones become victims of state policy.

I sincerely hope there isn’t a dementia sufferer in your own family or friends group, but if there is you’ll be aware of the horror of watching someone close to you lose their memory by instalments, seeing their collection of precious moments that formed their life being deleted one by one, disappearing like Theresa May’s 2017 promise to reform dementia policy, as though they had never happened.

If there is you’ll empathise with the lung-choking, tear-flooding heartbreak that results when you realise the very essence of your loved one’s personality is slipping away from them, the trauma that comes with trying to work out what is happening in that once-clever, creative mind in which thoughts are now bagatelling around.

You’ll have an understanding of how tragic the world becomes when a parent no longer recognises their own children, when an intelligent person with a wonderful lexicon can’t find the simplest word to explain what their feeling.

You’ll know how devastating it is to watch someone once of free spirit and fun and energy no longer able to make choices, to have preferences, to make the simplest decisions. You’ll appreciate how dementia is about coping with a confusion and anxiety, which becomes a loud scream for help – and ends ultimately with deafening silence.

You were once Health Secretary, but I don’t know how aware you are of the collateral damage of dementia – or of what you plan to do about it in an independent Scotland.

Do you recognise that in order to have a solid, progressive functioning society we need our people not only to lose their minds – research to find a cure has to be a priority – and families not to lose their dignity? They are being treated like the dirt-poor farmers in Steinbeck novels whose homes are repossessed by the bank.

We need an end to a system whereby dementia is treated as “social cost” illness, and those with more than £23,500 in the bank and a house have to pay for their own care home.

UK Families have paid out £1.5 billion in the past two years alone. What sort of society have we created whereby a person who develops this illness of the brain is punished for being hard-working, careful and conscientious?

What of the NHS? Will it continue to pay for heart/cancer operations for the obese, their ill-health often a result of a dereliction of personal responsibility, yet the dementia sufferer can have led a life of healthy control and see their legacy destroyed?

Not everyone has to watch their parents’ home be sold to pay for care of course. The affluent can afford it, but most likely won’t have to, because the home(s) will have gone into a trust, which ring-fences assets.

But for most the reality is tragedy, about learning to cope with money reserves dwindling and the familial friction which results from internal crises. And while time should be spent on making the dementia sufferer’s experience as painless as possible, creating special moments, enjoying that life as much as is imaginable, what the relative doesn’t need is impending cash disaster, having to spend a single second worrying about selling a house to pay a £1,200 a week care home bill.

Yes, the Scottish Government backs organisations such as Alzheimer’s Scotland, which provides important services to the community, putting training systems in place, creating dementia-aware shop facilities, drop-in centres. It’s all good.

But we need to make dementia, a disease that will destroy one in three, a primary focus. Michael Gove has spoken of the “terrible shadow of dementia”, promising to introduce “a system of social care of insurance supported by the state, to prevent loss of homes”.

If he can do this can’t you? He’s right to recognise that dementia isn’t simply River City’s disease of the month. It’s real. It’s wrecking lives.

In a bizarre sense, we’re lucky in Scotland in that we don’t live as long as our counterparts in England. Yet, we’re also working longer. Paying more National Insurance. For what?

But what’s truly insane about mind loss is the way we classify it, that those who do live longer are being punished by having their legacy, often their very point of being, removed.

End this now, Nicola. Come up with a plan to help the 100,000 present-day sufferers. And when you get the referendum you demanded yesterday I’ll sign on the dotted line.

Read more: Scottish Government slammed over support given to dementia sufferers