Nominations have closed in the race to succeed Sturgeon, with three aspirants for office. Humza Yousaf, the Health Secretary, is personable and faithful to Sturgeon — and to some of her less popular policies — but widely judged ineffective. Kate Forbes, the rapidly-promoted Finance Secretary, has refused to hide her Wee Free Presbyterian morality and has lost backers as a result, yet is presently ahead of Yousaf in the polls. Ash Regan, formerly a junior cabinet minister, is a distant third.

Though she is the outsider in the contest, it is Regan who offers Salmond a second political life. She would, she says, welcome him back into the SNP — apparently insouciant about his near-certain determination to use a new membership card to lead once more, officially or not. It would be a place from which he could start to repair his slumped popularity, running at a mere 10%. Indeed, it may be a deliberate strategy: the recreation of a male-female duumvirate, with Salmond, whatever his title (or none) again in the saddle.

Speaking to Sky yesterday, he insisted that he does not “have a dog in this race” as part of an interview in which he accused Yousaf of skipping the final vote on legalising same-sex marriage in Scotland due to “religious pressure”. In a recent op-ed, though, he did little to hide his preference between the three candidates. 

None of that trio, however, possesses the effrontery, the unembarrassability, the chutzpah and the ferocity which the SNP requires to pull it out of the already visible weakening and cracking of its political structure. Were Scotland to gain independence, a recent report by 4-Consulting points to a quarter of a million job losses, a sharp drop in output and deep cuts in public services, all hitting the worst-off the most. This repeats the findings of many such surveys over the past decade. 

Only a leader able to ignore the dreary realities of secession’s inevitable impoverishment could again convince their people of the existence of a happy land not so far away. More than this, they would have to possess the will to dragoon the party into unity, should they hope to hold the nationalists’ lead into the future. Sturgeon, leading Salmond’s party in his style, kept the independence bubble from bursting. Assuming her resignation to be final, only Salmond, now shorn of a large source of Russian income, fits the job description. He may not be on the ballot, but no other figure visible has a realistic shot of delivering the long-vaunted promise that defines the very existence of his party.