BEFORE any national election campaign SNP pledges on independence have become as predictable as the first undraped chest of a Glasgow spring. You can set your watch by them.

A little more than two weeks out from Scotland’s local authority elections it’s been revealed that Nicola Sturgeon has hosted some gatherings on the subject of – wait for it – Scottish independence.

What’s more: these meetings were “top-level” ones and featured “preparations” for (you’ve guessed it) a “second independence referendum”. Not only that: there were three of these meetings, two of which were actually held this year. Also present were serious-minded chaps like John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister and Angus Robertson who gets to be called the Cabinet Secretary for ”Government Business and Constitutional Relations” these days.

Personally, I find it re-assuring that Mr Robertson was present at this gathering as he seemed to have dropped off the political radar in recent months. This might have been due to his marketing commitments following the publication of his new book Vienna: The International Capital (a description unrecognisable to anyone outside of Vienna and Mr Robertson).

Mr Robertson’s cogitations on the history and development of Austria’s capital city is, I’m told, a weighty tome which took the best part of three years to write. Being possessed of a big brain though, he obviously found it easy to keep up to date with all the developments of his party’s preparations for the fabled “second referendum” while researching the history of Vienna.

And who knows: he might even have winkled out some previously unknown connections between the development of modern Austria and Scotland’s struggle for self-determination. Fortified by years of study into Austrian history his transition from mid-European savant to chief of the SNP’s independence bureau was obviously a smooth one.

Of course, if you were being unkind you might muse on the absurdity of the situation if it were to be revealed that Steve Clarke, while trying to steer Scotland’s international football team to the Promised Land of a World Cup finals, had spent the last few years secretly working on a biographical study of Ernst Happel and his influence on the development of Austrian football. But being an open-minded chiel, I’m happy instead to take comfort in the fact that the SNP’s Constitutional chief is a learned and well-travelled lad o’ pairts.

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