TWO anecdotes, gathered in the last week, seemed to define the opposing extremes that characterise the reign of Nicola Sturgeon. A friend, whose own leadership skills have graced corporate boardrooms across the globe, had observed Scotland’s First Minister speaking during her visit last week to the US.

This chap has always opposed Scottish nationalism, but as a Scot he’d been proud to receive compliments from overseas colleagues about her poise. “She had everything you wanted to see in your country’s leader on a visit abroad,” he said: “Confidence, a sense of purpose and the ability to convey ideas clearly and cogently. She seemed at ease in exalted company.”

Later, a darker sketch with echoes of something sinister. This concerned the reported aftermath of a Holyrood question tabled by the SNP MSP John Mason who’d wanted to know about the number of men currently serving time inside women’s prisons. The leadership of the Scottish Greens were unhappy that such a query had been asked at all.

You may consider this somewhat predictable behaviour from a party whose members regularly gather to vilify feminists on social media for being on the wrong side of the Gender Recognition Act debate. More startling was an official communique from the SNP to Mr Mason claiming that his question had somehow fallen foul of the party’s commitment to ending transphobia. It didn’t seem to cut any ice that Holyrood’s Presiding Officer had approved Mr Mason’s question in advance.

Taken with several other reported incidents from women members who have found themselves marginalised for being querulous about aspects of the SNP’s proposed GRA reforms it suggests that something is rotten inside the party.

In the week when Nicola Sturgeon became Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister she was greeted by evidence that the mission which defines her party more than any other is currently in dire straits. The results of a YouGov survey conducted for The Times showed that in the eight years since the first referendum on independence, support for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom remains steadfast at 55%.

Much more troubling for the First Minister is that support for independence has continued its recent downward trajectory. When Don’t Knows are stripped out it sits at 38%, hovering around its lowest point since 2014.

Even those who remain resolutely loyal to Ms Sturgeon may be wondering how it’s come to this. How, for instance, can you lose so much support following an extended period that’s revealed the Government of the UK to have been run as a kleptocracy where lying, corruption and contempt for the rule of law is now accepted as routine?

There’s another question: having been bequeathed by her predecessor a buoyant and optimistic Yes movement which seemed to be in the moral and numerical ascendancy why is it now divided against itself and lately come to radiate spite and malice?

Those of us who have expressed dismay at the glacial progress towards a second referendum must now consider that these poll numbers render that project unthinkable. We too are entitled to ask what has contributed to this when everything that Boris Johnson encounters corrupts at his touch.

Perhaps the mask of iron-clad rectitude that’s been carefully constructed around the SNP’s public face is beginning to crumble. And that even as the Johnson regime is exposed as a corrupt sham so the Scottish Government – virtually unopposed in 15 years – is revealed as lacking the basic competence to deal with those tasks which affect people’s daily lives: spending public money wisely; improving standards in education; reducing health inequality and providing an efficient transport network. Perhaps too, those working-class communities who’d felt betrayed by Labour now feel that the SNP has also begun to cheat on them.

The Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has attracted criticism for rejecting progressive alliances with SNP groups in several local authorities. This only works though, if you think the SNP really are ‘progressive’. As the Scottish Government quietly ditched its sacred commitment to reducing the educational attainment gap it signalled moves to become a client state of NATO by floating the idea of hosting nuclear weapons.

Curiously too, the four-year-old Growth Commission, which began looking out-dated even as it was being printed, has been revived. The original troubles with it remain: that in its meek subservience to sterling, the Bank of England and the EU platinum members lounge it subjugates Scotland’s economic future to the whims and preferences of global corporatism.

This route of travel has been signposted by those senior SNP figures who have begun to turn on the trade union movement, despite having courted it chastely in the years prior to 2014. The Scottish Government’s chaotic and jejeune fire-sale of Scotland’s vast, future energy potential to gleeful global energy companies underlined this shift towards making the country’s economy a car-boot sale for the world’s corporate predators. It also indicated an alarming naivete born of rewarding loyal mediocrity at the expense of independently-minded talent.

An insidious system of patronage, seemingly inspired by proceedings at the court of Louis XIV, France’s sun king, operates at the heart of the SNP and all of it conducted by the First Minister’s husband Peter Murrell, the party’s grey eminence.

Verbal reports from dazed former members of the party’s ruling NEC resemble a script for the Muppet Show, minus the eloquence. So many cranks and shiftless performance artists have become aware that a historic opportunity exists for them in the Sturgeon administration to make the sort of money and attain a level of status that’s beyond them in the real world of work.

Once upon a time they were indulged as figures of fond amusement in the carnival atmosphere of the SNP conference floor. Now they get to dictate policy and occupy high rankings on party election lists. All they have to do is proclaim unswerving loyalty to the leader and be seen to attack those deemed to be suspect.

When these people get to run the big departments and have access to the shop till you’re asking for trouble. Finally, the Scottish public are glimpsing what lies beneath.

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