COME away aboard a wee flight of fancy. We land in a country where the First Minister is found to have had a four-year affair whilst still married to the father of most of their children. Her fancy man says he’s a bit of a techie, so the FM wheechs him off on a series of trade trips, where doubtless the evenings are spent in earnest conversation about the digital revolution.

He picks up assorted grants from the ­public purse to oil the wheels of his ­entrepreneurial spirit. Later on, when his lover casts him into outer darkness, he ­acquires another fat cheque from a tabloid newspaper with the traditional “kiss and tell” story.

Oddly, you might think, there are ­precious few media outlets prepared to do a follow up because, variously, “it’s a private matter” or “och, we always knew that; it’s cauld kail”. Those whose normal stock in trade is publicising every political “scandal” – leaving your mask off for five minutes at a funeral say – are suddenly found to be looking the other way. Any other way.

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Every week in this parallel universe she has to stand up in parliament and answer questions. Recently she’s been found to have been telling porkies every single week. But nobody bats much in the way of an eyelid, since that’s “just Nicola”. Periodically some of the people with whom she’s worked in the past go public with the fact that she’s never been on nodding terms with the truth, and has calibrated every ­single decision throughout her life on the basis of what is most likely to get her to the top of the greasy pole. But by and large she gets a free pass no matter how many ­disasters her government presides over.

Let’s suppose, just for the sake of ­argument you understand, that she has a cabinet secretary for health whose journey through Covid has been punctuated by fast tracking pals and donors to contracts worth many, many millions. Let’s suppose, however fanciful this might sound, that the selfsame cabinet secretary has been found guilty in the High Court of illegally failing to publish the names of many of the fortunate companies. Probably just as well when their expertise is in those legendary ­medical fields of pest control or retail ­confectionary. Come on, this is a crisis. Time for some ­lateral thinking, surely.

Her health secretary spends a lot of time on various “world beating” bits of kit most of which have bitten the dust before the pilot staggered to a conclusion. Yet the greatest triumph is surely a Test and Trace project which costs more than the entire Scottish block grant. A cool £37 billion was allocated to a system which a report found had neither reached all the people it was supposed to, nor persuaded half of them to isolate after a positive test.

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Her hapless Education Secretary gave indecision a really bad name as he ­trumpeted the great re-opening of schools one Monday, only to shut them all down again on Tuesday. Laugh? We nearly started.

Since the Home Office is an area ­reserved to Westminster, the FM can only watch and wonder as the Home Secretary is found guilty of breaching the ministerial code of conduct by bullying staff but stays in post. Unlike her permanent secretary who had had enough and took early retirement. A mere £340K plus costs bought his silence.

YOU get where I am going here. Whilst the First Minister of Scotland is put on trial for her political life for misleading a committee, and presiding over what she herself called a catastrophic failure by her civil service to handle a judicial review, the Prime Minister of the UK gets the kid glove treatment from his party, the official opposition, and, most damningly, the media.

It pains me to say this as someone who has been in various branches of ­journalism all her life, but a lot of the ­media have simply gone Awol over Boris’s government. If it weren’t for people like Byline Times, Unlock Democracy, The Ferret, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, many instances of rank bad and often illegal practices would simply not have come to light.

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There is a positively Trumpian subtext to this. When a government constantly breaks all the normal rules and conventions, our shock threshold gets adjusted accordingly. Things we would have found utterly beyond the pale with previous Prime Ministers somehow become the new – and apparently acceptable – norm.

Yet those same commentators who turn a Nelsonian eye to any outrage emanating from Downing Street and assorted cabinet offices, have a positively gimlet-like ­focus where standards are flouted north of the border. The other day two SNP offices were found to have benefitted from Covid support schemes. It was entirely wrong of them, and ignorance of the rules is no excuse. But compared with the amount of taxpayers’ money spaffed away down south it’s not the crime of the century.

There is another unsavoury aspect of this. If you draw these sometime illegal activities to the attention of people like Douglas Ross or Alistair Jack their default answer is that it has nothing to do with them. They represent Scotland’s interests. Aye right.

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Alister Jack sits round a cabinet table which agreed to cut aid to some of the most impoverished areas in the world, which folded the cabinet office for distributing same into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and which, despite thousands of babies starving to death in Yemen, authorised the sale of more weapons to the Saudi led force, breaking the licensing rules forbidding such exports, as trade secretary Liz Truss has admitted.

Mr Jack and Co have been accomplices before and after these shoddy facts. The alibi about only dealing with matters Scottish rings more than a bit hollow when Scottish Tory MPs serially brag on social media about how the UK’s take down of Holyrood is going just swimmingly. When they vote for deals which have been disastrous for Scotland’s export trade, trotting through the lobby at their master’s bidding like the political poodles they are.

When they wrap everything they can lay hands on in a union flag, seemingly unaware that for a serious swathe of ­Scottish voters this is a massive turn off.

I NOTE Scottish Labour leader Anas ­Sarwar has announced he plans to clean up Holyrood, asserting that it had become “a bit of a joke” of late, and ­suggesting this would be a good moment for an independent ethics committee. Well, none of us would pretend that the recent committee room shenanigans were Holyrood’s finest hours. Then again it did recognise that squandering huge sums of public money on a failed court procedure was a matter requiring investigation. The committee report, one commissioned by the ­Scottish government, and one undertaken by the former chief prosecutor of Northern ­Ireland have now been put in the public domain.

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Would that Westminster demonstrated the same enthusiasm for uncovering ­mistakes and accounting for the millions of public funds flushed down the drain as team Boris tried, and manifestly failed, to get a grip on the pandemic. To say so is to invite a torrent of “whataboutery” from the usual suspects, relating to the Scottish Government’s performance. And that is fair.

Yet they and we know that there hasn’t been a raft of dodgy contracts handed to party donors in Scotland. There hasn’t been anything resembling the scandal-strewn behaviour of the PM. And, by common consent, the FM’s grasp of Covid detail is in stark contrast to ­Boris’s bumblings. Where in the name of the wee man did he garner a reputation for ­oratory?

And why did anyone think Douglas Ross would set the Holyrood heather on fire? Frankly, he’s still looking for the matches.