Smart people do smart things, after all. To be honest, it’s been a while since the SNP made a clever, strategic move. This political party made a remarkable ascendancy during the first decade of this century under the three Ss - Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and a chap named John Swinney. In truth, though, since their near-miss in the 2014 referendum on independence, they’ve been making a living on the back of past success. The party’s perceived brilliance has been Potemkin-like.

Specifically, the failure to recognise why they lost that referendum (the lack of economic credibility in the eyes of constitutionally centrist and economically centrist voters), was met with a slow, corrosive doubling-down on the 45 per cent rather than a warm embrace of the five per cent, plus one, which they actually needed. The warm embrace, instead, was reserved for the Greens, a party which does not believe in a growing, capitalist economy.

But, what do we see before us? We see an SNP which has made its smartest, most strategic move in well over a decade. Sometimes, when an answer seems too obvious to be right, it is because it is obviously right. And the alliance between Mr Swinney and Kate Forbes is, so incredibly obviously, right.

It’s funny, I reflect, how the political bubble thinks. I have spent a fair amount of time in conversation with politicians from all parties during the course of this week, since Humza Yousaf announced his intention to resign. You can barely keep a smile off the faces of Labour and Conservative MSPs, with their SNP counterparts looking........

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