HUMZA Yousaf is the luckiest man alive and his priorities are our priorities and it isn’t Team Humza anymore, it’s one big team, Team Everyone, and, you just watch, he’s going to harness talent from across the SNP (except Kate, oops) and this will be the generation that delivers independence and if you don’t share the passion yet, you will, you will. Applause now please.

As acceptance speeches go, it was textbook stuff really, although it’s not the textbook I’d be reading from. The new First Minister needed to be upbeat but he also needed to be realistic. If politicians ignore the truth, a la Truss, voters stop listening, believing and respecting. Mr Yousaf should have acknowledged how much has gone wrong for the SNP so he could give the impression he might be able to fix it. But: nothing.

And so I’d like to suggest some of the lessons we’ve learned from Team Humza and his first five days as party leader. Some are political, some personal, all of them could spell trouble.

1: Unionists are relieved. I’m going to be honest here. When I heard Mr Yousaf had won, I felt a big wave of relief, but it was only later I worked out why. I do not want the SNP to succeed on independence and I was worried someone like Kate Forbes, with her right-leaning views on the economy, might appeal to people like me, people who are less likely to vote Yes. I do not have the same worry with Mr Yousaf. So yeah: relief.

2: He had no choice over Kate Forbes. This is where I feel some sympathy for Mr Yousaf. He couldn’t leave his former rival in the finance job because of those right-leaning views but the gulf between them is now so big – on gender reform, abortion, the bottle scheme – that most of the other big jobs were also out of the question. People are saying Forbes’s departure is his first mistake but he never had much option. And anyway, this is what happens when new leaders take over: in with the friends, out with the foes.

3: We have not reached the bottom yet. There’s been a lot of chat about how disengaged the SNP membership was and there’s truth in it. Of the 72,169 people who were eligible to vote, only 50,494 did, and only 24,336 of them voted for Mr Yousaf, that’s 33% of the total members, which, even with the SNP’s shaky grasp of political mandates, is not great.

But there’s a bigger point here, which is how those voters, and others like them, will behave in parliamentary elections, and the most recent polls seem to show the SNP would lose only five of their 64 seats at Holyrood. This is partly because if you support independence, you have nowhere else to go, but it’s also because, once formed, political habits can be hard to change. We saw it with Labour for decades and now we’re seeing it with the SNP. In other words, we haven’t hit the bottom yet and who knows when we will. This could be it for the next 30 years. Sorry.

4: This is not the start of a big Labour comeback. A major recovery in Scottish Labour’s fortunes is unlikely for some of the same reasons the SNP isn’t going to tank any time soon. It’s been interesting to listen to lapsed Labour voters and why they say they’d never go back and I get it: Labour, they say, took Scotland for granted. This isn’t to say some voters won’t peel off – Scottish Labour are around 6% up in the polling and there’s even talk of Labour targeting Mr Yousaf’s seat in Glasgow. But there’s no real evidence of any significant breakaway from SNP to Labour. So, as you were everyone.

5: The SNP has not adjusted. One of the reasons the leadership contest was interesting was you heard some voices in the party arguing it should reform its structures and tactics but there’s no sign anyone senior was listening. They will keep on with the gender reforms, if they can. They will keep on demanding referendums. Which means that the first five days of Mr Yousaf will be the next five days, and the next 50, and the next 500. We’re in for more of the same. Welcome to the stasis years.