SNP voter Paul Higgins was furious when he watched Nicola Sturgeon being questioned by MSPs for eight hours last week.

“It was brutal,” he says. “It was almost like everyone had judged her before she sat in the chair. They were out for blood.”

He was so angry he immediately signed up to become a member of the SNP for the first time.

And he wasn’t alone, with the party gaining more than 7000 new members in the 24 hours following the session at the Holyrood committee, which is examining the botched handling of harassment complaints against Alex Salmond by the Scottish Government.

After endless twists and turns in the long-running dispute between Sturgeon and her predecessor Salmond, the sudden boost to SNP membership was perhaps one of the most surprising yet.

Experts say it remains to be seen how recent events may impact the “real prize” of the SNP gaining an overall majority at the Holyrood elections in May.

Higgins, 26, from Renfrew, said while he had always voted SNP, the performance of the First Minister showed she was “on top as a leader”.

He said: “If you look at the comparison down south – with Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock right now, there are no hands going up there or admitting to any fault.

“I think people watching on Wednesday could really see the desperation of these parties in targeting her.

“I think it has backfired – the Unionists tried to smear her, but she has come out on top.”

Hayley Paku, 16, from Clydebank, also points to Sturgeon’s leadership as a reason why she joined the party last week.

“I definitely look up to her as a politician,” she said.

“I think the things she has done for Scotland are very admirable.

“The things that led up to this week consolidated why I wanted to be in the party.

“It was good to see so many people joining at the same time.”

Another new member Jordan Devenny, 24, from Aberdeen, said the events of the past week were the “final push” for him to join the party and show his support.

“I feel like she has been under a lot of attack and scrutiny,” he said.

“If she has been found to break the Ministerial Code, fair enough – but people in the Tory party have done the same and never receive the same treatment from the media. Joining the party is my way of opposing that.

“I joined and then I saw on Twitter there were thousands of others.

“It is good to know people are in the same mindset.”

Josh Wilson, an SNP councillor for Hamilton South, said his local branch had seen around 42 new members sign up – bringing the membership to 571.

“The actions of the opposition party calling for the First Minister to resign in the middle of a pandemic has obviously spurred some people into action,” he said.

“It was a welcome surprise. It will give us a boost and help us shift the focus away from the distractions which have gone on in the past and back onto ultimately winning the election and then onto the independence referendum.”

With just over two months to go until the Holyrood vote, the past two weeks of the dispute between Salmond and Sturgeon being very publicly played out couldn’t have come at a worse time for the party.

Not least because this year’s election will be crucial in achieving plans to go ahead with a second independence referendum. Polling consultant Mark Diffley said it was too early to say whether the fallout from the parliamentary inquiry would have any impact on voting choices.

He said polls carried out before the evidence sessions of both Salmond and Sturgeon had shown a slight dip for the SNP – but not enough for the party to “be in a state of panic”.

And he predicted the most likely scenario at this stage for the Holyrood election would be either an outright majority for the SNP or a pro-independence majority.

He said: “The third scenario [minority SNP Government] still looks unlikely – but we then come back to the central issue of will the [SNP] crisis deepen and further what is currently a marginal decline?

“This close to an election, could it possibly lead to not just the overall majority being lost, but the chances of a pro-independence majority being lost?”

But he added: “Things change so quickly and such was the reaction to the First Minister’s evidence in the inquiry.

“I suspect the SNP will feel more bullish about what subsequent polling will say. They are clearly talking about a bump in membership. But we do need to wait and see.

“Things do look brighter for the SNP and for their prospects as a result of this week, but we haven’t seen any actual hard evidence from polling to substantiate some of that.”

Salmond has accused Sturgeon of multiple breaches of the Ministerial Code, all of which she denies.

The coming weeks will see the publication of the report from the Holyrood committee which is carrying out the inquiry looking at the Scottish Government’s handling of harassment claims.

James Hamilton QC, who has been appointed to examine if the First Minister has broken the Ministerial Code, is also expected to finalise his conclusions in the next three weeks.

Last week Sturgeon pledged to release that report on the same day that she receives it.

Diffley said there was still a “huge amount” for the SNP to play for, with an estimated 30% of voters yet to make their mind up.

“It is the most important election of the devolution period and it is really difficult to get an overall majority,” he said. “It has only been done once, so it is a challenge.

“There is a very fine margin between getting an overall majority and falling a wee bit short of an overall majority, and that is the real prize here because of what it means for the constitutional question and the chances of another referendum.”