Can the SNP claw back support in Scotland?

On Thursday, health secretary Michael Matheson resigned and Humza Yousaf undertook a ‘mini-reshuffle’ of his cabinet. The scandal of the £11,000 iPad bill was only ever going to end this way. That it was allowed to rumble on eroding public trust for months is symptomatic of the SNP’s wider fortunes, which began to rapidly deteriorate almost a year ago to this day.

Fifty-one weeks ago a press conference was hastily arranged in the Drawing Room at Bute House. Nicola Sturgeon stood before Alexander Nasmyth’s pastoral portrait of Robert Burns, announced her resignation as first minister and set in motion a remarkable chain of events.

The signs of the decline were even there in the final months of Nicola Sturgeon’s lengthy and electorally successful premiership. Her own strategic assuredness began to wane and her government became embattled on several policy fronts — facts she recognised herself before she left office. Perhaps not taken seriously enough by the SNP at that time was that a fast encroaching political tide was already beginning to lap at its feet.