Shortly before the conference opened, Peter Murrell, the Scottish National party’s chief executive and husband of the Scottish first minister, stepped out on to the stage to give the lectern a last wipe and polish. Nothing could be left to chance: everything had to be just so. For a party committed to independence, Nicola Sturgeon is the political equivalent of royalty.
While half the Conservative party doesn’t really care one way or the other if David Cameron stays or goes, half the Labour party actively want to remove Jeremy Corbyn and half the Lib Dems don’t even know what Tim Farron looks like, Sturgeon is received with an adoration bordering on a holy rapture.
She only has to smile and her audience is already entranced. In her hands, five loaves and two fishes could put an end to food banks in Scotland. The occasional flash of vulnerability only makes her more invulnerable.
There must be times when even Sturgeon must ask herself what the hell is going on. Less than a year ago, the SNP was still Alex Salmond’s virtual personal fiefdom; now the former leader has been airbrushed out of the conference, with no events scheduled for him in the programme.
Alex who? These days the SNP is near enough Nicola’s for the taking. Under her stewardship, the party has won 56 seats in Westminster, is on course to increase its majority at next year’s Holyrood elections and membership numbers continue to rise.
Even the conference itself has been given a makeover, transformed from an informal get-together to a carefully stage-managed affair behind heavy black curtains in a giant warehouse attached to a conference centre outside Aberdeen. If the SNP ever wants somewhere to stash the nation’s Trident missiles out of harm’s way, it need look no further.
Sturgeon may have been riding an unstoppable wave in Scotland, but she’s done so with some style; not least because she’s managed to get people looking in every direction at once and all seeing the same thing.
Balancing the rhetoric of being in opposition in Westminster with the realities of being in power in Scotland – not a problem. You’d never have guessed the price of oil had halved in the past six months, the Scottish economy was under pressure and that many Scottish hospitals and schools were struggling to meet their targets. Sturgeon was just going to build 50,000 new houses and there wasn’t a soul who didn’t believe her.
Then there was the EU. Sturgeon and the SNP are committed to remaining in the EU and will be campaigning to do so in the forthcoming referendum. And yet ... the best chance the SNP has of securing a second independence referendum is if the Tories fail to back the Remain in Europe campaign and the UK votes to leave the EU. For Nicola and the SNP delegates, this was just one of those curious dialectical inevitabilities.
Nicola wasn’t afraid to talk about independence. She just didn’t want to talk about it right now. Her immediate goal was not to frighten away all those wavering Tory voters who might be persuaded to put their cross against a SNP candidate at next year’s Holyrood election but were still a bit iffy about the I word. Let them first dip their toes in the warmth of the holy waters and enlightenment would surely follow.
Not that Nicola chose to put it that way. Rather she wanted to melt hearts and minds. The referendum had been lost; it was time to move on. “And now these three remain,” she said, levitating several feet above the floor. “Respect, democracy and opportunism. And the greatest of these three is opportunism.”
The audience rose as one. Whatever Nicola says, goes. She is the Truth, she is the Way. What may have been off-message a few moments before was now on-message. The only person to have missed this change of script was Tommy Sheppard, the largest comedy impresario outside London before his election to Westminster in May. Sod the Tories, he shrugged. “Every time they say no to something they are increasing our ambition to have everything.” Somewhere backstage, a mirror cracked.
