John Swinney should be careful he doesn’t become the last first minister of Scotland, instead of rashly proclaiming that Andy Burnham will be the last prime minister of the UK.

Many former and even current independence supporters are fed up with the SNP’s constant constitutional grandstanding over the independence question.

And I also increasingly detect a groundswell of concern among those who aren’t independence-minded that the Scottish Parliament has been an expensive mistake.

From those many seeds of doubt may grow a forest of certainty that if we scrapped Holyrood tomorrow, we would be no worse off and perhaps a lot better off without it.

I’m not alone among those who have been, or still are to varying degrees, sympathetic to the idea of independence, in rolling my eyes as the SNP ignores the day job of the good governance of Scotland while pretending they still want to break up the UK.

Because be under no illusions, the SNP leader’s latest wheeze in meeting with Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth and Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill, is just a desperate bid to distract us from the dreadful job that the SNP – under Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and now........

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