WHEN people trust a political leader with their lives, the more banal matters of day-to-day government tend to look after themselves. Right now, many thousands of vulnerable Scots are trusting Nicola Sturgeon with their lives and their long-term health.

Those of us who dwell in Scotland’s self-obsessed media bubble are disdainful of anything that speaks of raw human need in the midst of politics. We find it difficult to grasp the concept of people arranging their days around the First Minister’s daily coronavirus updates.

Look no further than this to understand why each of the main Unionist parties has become so distressed about Nicola Sturgeon’s daily press briefings. They accuse her of turning these into party political opportunities and are irked that the BBC permits it. That ordinary people, especially those who are elderly or who are shielding with relatives who are vulnerable, view these briefings as a lifeline seems not to matter to Labour and the Conservatives.

What causes them to gnash their teeth is that Scotland’s First Minister exudes competence, authority and leadership in these briefings. She also looks like she’s on top of the daily, shifting coronavirus numbers and that she knows how to interpret them and can identify the nuances and crevices of this pandemic.

Whenever there is optimism, Sturgeon is cautious, while bad news is greeted with an air of upbeat determination. She looks like she cares. She is a good advert for the independence brand and this is why her opponents want to shut her down. What drives them further round the twist is that their own champion, Boris Johnson struggles with emotions such as empathy.

In the finishing schools of the British Empire, signs of empathy and feeling the pain of others are regarded as forms of weakness. How can you be expected to build an empire, slaughter and enslave weaker nations and maintain the hegemony of your class if you actually develop sympathy for the positions of others? Nothing would ever get done.

It would be perverse to suggest the British Prime Minister doesn’t care as much about the pandemic as his Scottish counterpart. The problem for his advisers is that he just doesn’t look like he does. Too often it seems like a daily chore and this very academically gifted man seems to have difficulty grasping the significance of numerical patterns. He might care very deeply but to ordinary people whose immediate health and wellbeing hang on this man’s daily decisions, he doesn’t look as though he does.

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It’s against this setting that Scotland’s political and media sentinels must view the Holyrood inquiry into the Alex Salmond affair. Those many more people on the outside of this crucible who have looked to the First Minister for guidance and reassurance will not easily forgive the political classes if she is forced to resign before seeing this pandemic through.

To them, there doesn’t appear to be a silver bullet to justify toppling the SNP leader. All politicians lie and they lie to each other most of all. Misleading Parliament will not be considered sufficient reason by the vast majority of Scotland’s people to have her removed in the midst of a global pandemic during which she has been seen to have performed admirably.

Until now, that is. In the last two weeks or so the attributes that the First Minister is seen to represent: honesty, decency, kindness and empathy, have all been replaced by much darker motivations: malevolence, cruelty, vindictiveness and contrivance. What is more, these can now no longer be concealed within the esoteric worlds of political horse-trading and the bewildering nuances of the gender debate.

It’s become clear that Holyrood’s inquiry into the Alex Salmond investigation is being undermined by the Scottish Government which has, at every turn, sought to undermine it. Key evidence has been obstructed and the First Minister herself, far from assisting it in every way possible as she’d previously pledged to do, has sought to block and delay.

HER husband, the SNP’s chief executive, is now refusing point blank to make any further appearances and has been accused of perjuring himself. Though we may not yet know with any great certainty who the perpetrators are, there is enough evidence to suggest that one of the darkest political conspiracies in Scottish public life has been attempted under the noses of the Scottish people and that several millions of pounds of our money has been wasted on it.

During it, the Crown Office and Police Scotland have not been seen to be acting as trusted and disinterested arms of the judicial but as the private army of an entitled cabal at the top of the SNP.

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Scotland’s most senior civil servant has held on to her job despite clear questions about her personal and professional conduct in pursuit of an outcome which always seemed doomed to failure.

The public might not care as much about standards in public life as the political classes purport to but they know what “taking the piss” looks like. And Nicola Sturgeon, Peter Murrell, Leslie Evans, several special advisers, more than a few MSPs and a gaggle of £100k-plus civil servants now all stand accused of taking the piss. Big time.

Sturgeon’s video in support of transgender rights could also be filed under “taking the piss”. In so doing, she effectively encouraged misogynistic aggression against several of her party’s female members by painting a target on their back over transphobia.

One of them, Joanna Cherry, consistently outshines Sturgeon’s acolytes and the collection of bottom-feeders who somehow made it on to the SNP’s candidates list.

It seems integrity, honesty and ability are rated lower than inarticulate grandstanding, bullying and sanctimony on the SNP’s front bench at Westminster. This would appear to be nothing more than the politics of envy and spite by Scotland’s First Minister.

Sturgeon and her nodding dogs at Westminster and Holyrood have stage-managed the trans issue for the purposes of winning a factional war within the party.

It also deflects from an inquiry which daily reveals more and more that is sinister in this party and the apparatus of government.

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There is a facile and lazy view in some nationalist circles that anything goes just so long as Scotland gets her independence.

Will it be subject to the influence of big business or will it offer a chance of fairer redistribution of wealth? Don’t ask and just do as you’re told.

The SNP’s party managers better organise an independence referendum sooner rather later. There’s a limit to which the Scottish public, including many Yes voters, will permit being thought of as idiots by Nicola Sturgeon and her party within a party.