THERE was a lot of high-falutin talk when Nicola Sturgeon laid her cooperation deal with the Scottish Greens before MSPs on Tuesday, and plenty of low politics too.

“We must all try to do politics differently,” said the First Minister.

“There have been times when our politics has been toxic and polarised.

“We should all make an effort to disagree more civilly.”

When Douglas Ross asked her about the impact of the deal on oil jobs and the economics of independence, she complained the questions were “barely coherent”, while the Scottish Tory leader himself wasn’t even “vaguely competent”. In a civil way.

But alongside the familiar shin-kicking, there was a more intriguing strand to the First Minister’s speech.

On one level it was a trap, artfully presented as a way out of one.

Yet I don’t think it can be dismissed as simply a trap, as it was based on hard facts demonstrated over time.

This was when the FM held up the deal as an example to other parties.

You have a choice, she told them, you can work with us, in a way that is common and unremarkable across Europe, or stew in your dogma and become ever more irrelevant.

She said: “To their great credit, the Greens have decided to come into government… rather than simply standing on the sidelines shouting for something to happen with no consideration at all of how to make it happen. It is the difference between achieving nothing in opposition and achieving lots by having the guts to go into government and take the decisions required.”

It was almost Freudian in the way it struck at the opposition’s impotence. I’m surprised she didn’t waggle a pinky at the three male Unionist leaders too.

Of course, the instinctive reaction of the opposition was to push back.

This is perfectly sensible in its way.

It’s not their job to help the Government look good. It’s their job to tear it down and replace it.

The opposition also want to stop the SNP-Green alliance flourishing and becoming permanent. They’re duty bound to try and throttle it.

So expect a lot of debates and votes on wedge issues to put it under strain.

In this, they’re helped by the cooperation agreement itself.

This promises gender recognition reform in year one, an issue on which the Greens are absolutist, while many SNP MSPs are decidedly wary.

A new National Care Service, described by the FM on Tuesday as “perhaps the biggest public sector reform that Parliament will ever have undertaken”, will also be fraught.

Councils hate it, fearing a power grab that tramples on local democracy. The Greens have traditionally championed localism against the SNP’s centralising tendencies.

But these lively skirmishes don’t address the bigger picture.

When Anas Sarwar said the deal was “about greater control for Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP rather than cooperation”, she made it personal for the Scottish Labour leader.

“There is a strategic choice for the opposition parties in the face of the agreement,” she said.

“I am fairly certain which choice the Conservatives will make, but which choice Labour will make is perhaps more of an open question.

“I suspect that it will define much of Anas Sarwar’s leadership of his party.

“The choice is whether to come with us… to work together to meet the challenges that we face, or to move more and more to the margins of politics along with the Conservatives.”

This is the trap that is more than just a trap. Scanning the horizon, Ms Sturgeon doesn’t perceive much threat from the Tories. They’re a handy punchbag, not a government-in-waiting. But Labour and the Liberal Democrats, although their numbers are dismal now, are the only other parties to have held power since 1999.

During the election, Willie Rennie was open about his desire to get the old alliance back on the road, and he and Mr Sarwar were unfailingly helpful to one another in the TV debates.

Just as it is in the opposition’s interest to bring discord to the SNP-Green deal, so it is in Ms Sturgeon’s to stop Labour and the LibDems, now under Alex Cole-Hamilton, getting too organised.

She knows Mr Sarwar and his bosses are hungrier for power, and a good chunk of his party is open to Indyref2, whereas the LibDems are more rigidly against it.

So she comes bearing water in the desert, offering the lure of power to those without it, all the better to divide them and stop them winning it.

Mr Sarwar gets it.

He called the FM “the divider-in-chief” and warned the Greens they would quickly find out “that, to Nicola Sturgeon, co-operation means rolling over and doing what you are told”.

And yet, and yet... Ms Sturgeon isn’t wrong. The opposition are impotent.

The SNP have been in power for 14 years and keep winning elections.

They are the anchor tenant in any foreseeable Scottish Government. The opposition parties do face a strategic choice, perhaps an existential one.

Do they keep role playing, feigning influence, pretending the next election is going to be their big breakthrough, or do they do things differently?

It’s must be a painful thought for them, getting sucked into a Nationalist blob. But hoping the SNP will conveniently implode and drop the keys to Bute House is a daydream.

The Holyrood opposition are going nowhere. The Tories can console themselves with having colleagues in the UK Government and being a laddish awkward squad at Holyrood. But as another five years of impotence beckons, others face tougher choices.