For those of us pulling an eight-hour shift at the P&J conference arena at the Aberdeen election count the task of keeping ourselves occupied could have been challenging. 

On Thursday night, however, we looked forward to the wise epithets of Nicola Sturgeon on ITV to keep us occupied. It turned out to be a false hope.

According to some of my broadcast colleagues, the former First Minister of Scotland was being paid £10,000 for her election night punditry. In the last 48 hours, several senior SNP people have spoken of the need to “reflect” on their electoral losses. 

Perhaps ITV bosses will now be “reflecting” on their decision to hire Ms Sturgeon. Her only contributions of note grew more unhinged as the evening progressed. She began by being nasty about Peter Smith, one of the few Scottish broadcast journalists who ask the sitting government the questions that viewers are asking. 

Mr Smith had rather expertly and eloquently nailed the lie that the SNP’s losses were mainly due to an overall desire to kick out the Tories. 

Scottish voters aren’t stupid and don’t like being dismissed as the ignorant bigots that the Scottish Government and the Greens are so fond of portraying them as.

They turned on the SNP for no other reason than that they didn’t like what they were being told by the party and for their many manifest failures in office. 

Ms Sturgeon also said that it was a mistake to chuck the Scottish Greens out of government. If this is what amounts to her analysis you can only wonder how she ever made it in politics. 

Scottish Greens

The decision to embrace the Greens and their creepy agendas was one of the main reasons cited on doorsteps across Scotland when I joined some candidates on the stump. Literally no-one had anything positive to say about this psycho party. 

Ms Sturgeon also cited what she regarded as the failure of her party to link the cause of independence to people’s everyday lives. In this, she was entirely accurate. It’s just that the main culprit in this failure was one Nicola Sturgeon. 

Under her influence the SNP loathed everyday people and their everyday lives. 

‘Misogyny’ madness
Laughably, some of Ms Sturgeon’s media glove puppets have since been seeking to defend her in the face of criticism for her role in the SNP’s apocalypse. 

According to them, criticism of her was rooted in misogyny. It seemed not to matter that for almost a decade she was the most powerful person in Scotland and had influence in the affairs of the nation that extended well beyond mere politics. 

Far from being the victim of misogyny, Ms Sturgeon was the chief enabler by which misogynistic males were able to flourish inside the SNP. Many of them found a home within the party’s Westminster group and were gloriously and pleasingly defenestrated on Thursday night.

It became known throughout civic Scotland during her reign that if you wanted to have a rewarding career in the public sector you had to sign up completely to her identity and cultural policy agenda.

Put simply, if you were a woman who believes that trans women are men then you could never have a career in Scottish public life. 

No-one did more damage to real women’s rights in Scotland than Nicola Sturgeon. No gender-critical woman could ever feel entirely safe or valued in her Scotland. 

Male lickspittles
ANOTHER characteristic of Ms Sturgeon’s reign was an implacable hounding and harrying of gifted women who dared to disagree with her. Much of this was carried out by male lickspittles like the party’s former Westminster leader Ian Blackford and a gangrenous cabal of nationalist MPs who formed around him.  

Ian Blackford

They were united by several common traits, including possessing no discernible talent to justify their status as MPs and a desire to marginalise talented women.

One of the main victims of their campaign was Joanna Cherry, the most able Westminster MP the party possessed. 

Ms Cherry was highly regarded across all parties at Westminster and gained respect for her expert role in embarrassing Boris Johnson when he tried to prorogue Parliament. 

Her own party had the opportunity to own this process, but such were the levels of jealousy surrounding her that the SNP would rather stay silent about Mr Johnson’s perfidy than be seen to support Ms Cherry. 

They were also fearful of attempting to do anything that might incur the wrath of Nicola Sturgeon. And being seen to stand with Joanna Cherry most definitely would have. 

Voter backlash
JOANNA Cherry was one of a few good SNP MPs who succumbed on Thursday night to the inevitable backlash by voters against the party’s unhinged culture wars. Some Sturgeon apologists sought to portray Ms Cherry’s demise as proof that there wasn’t really a backlash over the gender cult. 

Joanna Cherry

This, of course, is nonsense. Beyond the trans debate, there were literally dozens of reasons to ditch the SNP and anyone associated with them. The Scottish Government had failed in everything it touches and this was evident on dozens of doorsteps that I called on. 

Indeed, while observing Ms Cherry on the doorsteps of Currie in south-west Edinburgh last month, it was clear that while some voters held her personally in high regard, they also wanted to “teach the SNP a lesson”. 

For those of us who still support an independent Scotland, it’s to be hoped that the party will heed that lesson. Yet, I have my doubts. It’s clear that some of the most wretched of the careerists and mountebanks who lost their seats on Thursday will attempt to insinuate themselves onto the party lists for the 2026 Scottish election. 

Under no circumstances must this be allowed to happen. 

If voters see the names of these flatulent clowns on the lists then they’ll perform another retreat from the SNP.