The SNP is on its way to becoming the Ozymandias party. If you know Percy Shelley’s eponymous poem, you’ll get the similarities.

In Ozymandias, Shelley meets “a traveller from an antique land”. For the purposes of our discussion about the SNP, let’s date that antique land to any time prior to February 2023. The traveller points Shelley to a ruined statue: “two vast and trunkless legs of stone”, and “on the sand, half sunk a shattered visage”.

It’s a monument to some great pharaoh, long-forgotten. Near the ruins a pedestal reads: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

What hubris. What a fall. Ozymandias, in his time the most powerful ruler on Earth, is now a “colossal wreck”.

The SNP hasn’t quite been swallowed by Saharan sands. But it’s certainly a poor imitation of its former self. Today, the party waits in humiliating stupor to see if it can pass its budget. It’s friendless in parliament, hostage to the mood of Green MSPs betrayed by Humza Yousaf.

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Its Midas touch is gone. Everything gets smeared with excrement rather than turning to gold. It stumbles from stupid scandal to stupid scandal, defending the indefensible whether that’s Michael Matheson running up enormous bills on the public purse or Stephen Flynn plotting against another SNP politician. It can’t even pass legislation. The phrase "zombie government" is too kind.

Party membership has plummeted so sharply half the jobs at SNP HQ are in jeopardy. So Happy Christmas, workers.

There’s a gaping black hole in SNP finances. At its 2019 height, there were 125,000 members. Today, there are........

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