IT seems almost sinful to mock politicians for their shortcomings in parliamentary debate or public speaking. They don’t solicit our votes on the basis of their aptitude for oratory and, if they did, it would signify shallowness and more than a degree of superficiality. And besides, you only require to observe the seamless progression of charlatans from the Oxford Union to the UK Cabinet to know that eloquence is no indicator of intelligence or political acumen.

Willie Coffey, one of the SNP’s longest-serving MSPs, was widely mocked this week for his wretched attempts at improvisation in the midst of an important Holyrood debate about planning. In the unexplained absence of his committee’s convenor, Scottish Green MSP Ariane Burgess, Mr Coffey was summoned to open the debate instead.

This, however, wrecked the carefully-arranged choreography of this Holyrood business and the hapless member for Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley was flummoxed. His designated role in the proceedings was to read a pre-prepared conclusion to the debate. This in itself seemed a little odd. For, how can you properly sum up a debate if your remarks have been scripted prior to the actual event?

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Nevertheless, Mr Coffey gamely refused to depart from his script and was soon resembling a chap who has jumped out of a plane without his parachute. It gave us this this pearl: “Before reflecting on some of the contributions to this afternoon’s debate, which I am about to hear …”

We probably ought not to be surprised by Mr Coffey’s discomfort about a subject in which we’d supposed he’d gain some expertise. He belongs to a party where ability to think for yourself can signal the end of your career.

It explains why Joanna Cherry was removed from the SNP’s Westminster front bench and why others possessed of ability and gravitas have been hounded from the party and been replaced by a host of talentless grifters.

Willie Coffey’s agonising moments at the rabbit/headlights interface were part of a series seemingly designed to showcase the comic ineptitude of Scotland’s governing party. Elsewhere, we had Pete Wishart, the SNP MP, instructing us to “vote til you boak” by compiling a list of election candidates in “a descending order of increasing nausea”. It also included the phrase: “full-on dry boak”.

This neatly describes what many pro-independence supporters feel when having to vote for performance artists such as him at general elections. And when the history of these days comes to be written an entire chapter will be required to accommodate the inchoate fantasies of Lorna Slater.

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The prominence of characters such as these – and a host of other political quacks in the SNP firmament – recalls the plot of the BBC’s brilliant 1970s comedy series, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

The strategy favoured by the drama’s titular main character sees him tire of his business success and then seeking to dismantle it by appointing a cast of hopeless deadbeats to key executive positions. If you didn’t know that the SNP was the main party of Scottish independence you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had begun to deploy a Reginald Perrin strategy without telling the rest of us.

Something of a subtle volte-face in the party’s game-plan for next month’s council elections seems to be evident. In previous national elections its candidates, acting on a seemingly pre-agreed signal, begin filling their previously dormant social media timelines with references to independence as the leadership begins making its customary pledges about “getting set” or “preparing” or “doing everything in our power” to deliver a second referendum.

In recent weeks though, the I-word has been scarce. It barely featured on the BBC’s Debate Night, despite the presence of SNP and Green politicians. There’s good reasons for this strategy of concealment. Each mention of independence naturally invites reasonable questions such as “so, when are you thinking about pressing for a second referendum” and “have you done any work on the currency or on future cross-border relations with England”.

Being intellectually hindered or lacking leadership instruction on how to respond to these inquiries it’s probably best simply not to refer to independence at all. Thus the blueprint that’s served them well in previous elections has now become something of an inconvenience. All previous claims by Nicola Sturgeon and her senior acolytes about having a referendum before the end of next year are now treated with contempt.

The whereabouts of the £600k that was solicited from Yes activists for just such a purpose has now passed into legend. Who knows how it was spent but it doesn't seem to have been on basic stuff like renting premises; hiring staff; creating a marketing strategy or keeping Yes groups updated. There’s been Mike Russell’s converted indy bread van and unrecorded meetings with unspecified civil servants about a White Paper and that’s about it.

Some glove-puppets have been eager to convey the fiction that it would be madness to strive for a referendum until you were reasonably sure of winning it. This though overlooks the reasonable charge that senior people have therefore been making all this stuff up about a referendum by 2023. It also conveniently sidesteps the fact that an extreme Brexit and the prolonged chaos and corruption of the UK Government has been a golden opportunity to press ahead with plans if the SNP had ever been serious about them.

Recent opinion polls of council voting intentions have indicated a significant reduction in SNP support. They also represent every Nationalist’s ultimate nightmare: that inevitably a high water-mark of support for independence must be reached and that the trick is to make independence happen before then.

Must we now consider the possibility that this point was reached a while ago? And that a reduced outcome on May 5 is the desired one for a leadership that’s grown so weary of the burden of expectation that it can no longer even pretend? And which now exists merely as the party of managerial Scotland: neither one thing nor another; a twilight party of wage thieves topping up their pensions and counting their investments?

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.