LET’S please not kid ourselves, here: how many of us who have become passionate about the cause of Scottish independence are genuinely eager for Britain to remain in the European Union? I’ll hazard an informed guess. I’d say it was the square root of the number of times Scotland have won a Six Nations match since, well… since 2014.

When I hear that Nicola Sturgeon is planning to make speeches in England on how she thinks Britain should operate in the EU, I am reminded of the politically correct language that some Celtic and Rangers supporters have deployed down through the years when asked about their rivals prospects of progressing in European competition. “I hope the Gers/Sellick do the business because it will help Scotland’s overall co-efficient.” Loosely translated, this means: “As usual, I hope they get absolutely horsed.”

Sturgeon, unwisely in my view, has chosen to peg a second independence referendum on a major trigger event, such as Britain opting to leave the EU while Scotland votes to remain. Initially, this seemed like a prudent course to plot. Those voting Yes in September, 2014 reached 45 per cent, an astounding figure when you consider that less than two years previously it was hovering just above 30 per cent in every opinion poll. That it came within five points of victory in the face of the most intense campaign of economic intimidation and propaganda that all the forces of the British establishment had waged since the Miners’ Strike in 1984, the figure of 45 per cent was all the more remarkable still. Nevertheless, the No vote won with a comfortable margin of 10 per cent.

The First Minister, not unreasonably, felt that before a second referendum occurred she would have to be sitting on a lead going into the campaign. What would help her in this objective would be a major political event affecting our future where there was a clear divergence between what Scotland wanted and what the rest of the UK did. Sturgeon though, like most of us, probably didn’t think that David Cameron would be bounced into an early In/Out referendum. Like many of us also she probably didn’t think there was a serious prospect of the UK opting out. Well now we know: he has and there is.

Cameron is a consummate and clever politician but possesses absolutely no guiding principles whatsoever and certainly none on Europe. He was simply the next Identikit Etonian, Oxbridge cipher who looked good in a suit.

As such, he was always going to be open to manipulation by whichever group held sway in the UK Conservative Party. In order to survive a reported putsch by his party’s Right he was forced into promising them an EU referendum. He believed that the odds of him leading an overall Tory majority into power at the 2015 election were slim and thus so would be the chances of bringing forward an EU vote.

The charge to the exit door of so many senior Conservatives after Cameron laughably claimed he had won “special status” for Britain in Europe shows you which side they think will win.

This lot simply want to be well-positioned for promoted posts when Cameron’s successor is named in a few years’ time. They obviously think, as do the majority of Tory MPs, that their next leader will emerge from the Out camp.

This leaves our First Minister in a bit of a pickle. She was hoping to delay holding a second independence referendum for as long as she could. And in the meantime she would manage the expectations of the most fervent Yes supporters; those who want indyref2 sooner rather than later. But if the UK votes to leave Europe against the wishes of the Scottish people just a few weeks after the SNP are returned in Scotland with another whopping majority the clamour for another Scottish independence referendum very soon – and sooner than Ms Sturgeon would have liked – will be impossible to resist.

This is no time to be showing anything other than absolute confidence about the timing of a second independence referendum. Yet by making it look as though external circumstances in the control of the Tory Right are driving the timetable for a second independence referendum Ms Sturgeon now risks losing control of the timing and the setting. She has always claimed adroitly under examination by Unionist commentators that only the Scottish people will decide the timing of a second referendum. This looks a bit hollow, now.

On Sunday morning, we were treated to Iain Duncan-Smith, that most wretched and reactionary of Tory ministers, telling us that a vote to stay in Europe would make the UK more vulnerable to a Paris-style gun attack. Only the man who wants to deprive the sick and the elderly of their rightful benefits would seek to make political capital out of the Paris tragedy. Later we heard Cameron trying to appeal to the likes of Duncan-Smith by being tough on refugees and easy on billionaire banking cartels. More absurd and ridiculous still was that a significant number of otherwise reasonably-minded British voters were seriously waiting for Boris Johnson to make his pronouncement live on Sunday night television. Somehow, Johnson, a dangerous buffoon from the Conservative Party’s howling tendency, has become the weather-vane on Europe for those who don’t know any better.

Nicola Sturgeon must wrestle back control of the independence timetable and she has a golden opportunity of doing so in the SNP’s election manifesto, due to be published in early April.

In this she should be saying that a second, confident overall majority gained at Holyrood to go with the historic first one at Westminster constitutes a popular mandate.

Even if she still chooses not to seek one in the lifetime of her 2016 Holyrood administration she can signal that she will begin laying the groundwork for one early in the life of the next one.

At Saturday’s Radical Independence conference in Edinburgh, Jim Sillars put it as eloquently as ever: “There’s been an awful lot of talk about triggers for a referendum. That worries me deeply because it’s a sign of weakness. What you’re saying is: ‘We don’t know how to get there by ourselves, but perhaps some confluence of external circumstances will come together and hand it to us’. It won’t.”