Utter embarrassment of SNP MSPs - one a minister - shows the ongoing decline of standards at Holyrood

For those who believe the Scottish Parliament is failing – and that number is rising – each incompetent MSP risks becomes the living embodiment of what went wrong.

That being so, it’s important to remember that there are good, serious, and dedicated men and woman at Holyrood doing important work.

If only there were more of them.

Unfortunately, these competent public servants are vastly outnumbered by a swarm of dolts, a zombie horde of half-wits and chancers whose presence in our national parliament serves the sole purpose of keeping them off the streets.

Public trust in devolution has plummeted since the those heady early days of the new parliament when the overwhelming majority of voters believed the Scottish government was on their side.

Back in 1999, 81 per cent of Scots trusted ministers to act in their best interests. Today, that’s dropped to just 47 per cent.

Those cynics who’d damn the whole devolution project to hell can hardly be blamed. The past couple of weeks have shown Holyrood at its excruciating worst.

Watching SNP Collette Stevenson in what, I suppose, we should call “action” at a meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s transport committee on Wednesday morning was to experience a dizzying combination of emotions comprising acute, bone-crunching embarrassment and white hot fury.

Stevenson, whose election as an MSP in 2021 was yet another in a series of blows for East Kilbride, sits on the committee and we might, reasonably, expect her to have some grasp of the issues she’s dealing with.

Following two hours of evidence to the committee on the matter of Scotland’s rail services (if you missed it, things aren’t great), Stevenson said to a witness: “I take it Transport Scotland is a registered charity?”

It was to the great credit of Graeme Cook, director of rail delivery for the organisation, that he remained fully calm when replying that, no, Transport Scotland was not a charity but a government body.

Someone with a less polished boardroom manner might have profaned or wept. I might have done both.

What had Stevenson been doing for the previous two hours while evidence was being heard? Singing to herself in her head? Counting her fingers?

But it’s not just that Stevenson had spent two hours during questioning under the bizarre misapprehension that Transport Scotland was a charity, it’s that she must have believed this to be so since she learned of its existence which, given she is a 55-year-old MSP who serves on the relevant committee, should have been some time ago.

Stevenson’s peerless display of idiocy came just a week after the recently appointed cabinet secretary for economy, tourism and transport, Stephen Flynn, made a colossal fool of himself while giving evidence to the very committee on which she sits.

Liberal Democrat Willie Rennie wanted to talk to the cabinet secretary about a story at the top of the BBC’s news website, reporting on a “significant incident” on the Glen Sannox ferry, last year, when 700kg of highly flammable methane gas was released while 82 passengers were on board.

What followed was knuckle-gnawing. Flynn floundered and flapped before explaining, quite unsatisfactorily that he hadn’t seen this news story because he had been FaceTiming his kids.

This plea for ordinary-guyness was all hugely touching but the problem wasn’t that Flynn hadn’t seen the BBC’s news story, it was that he had not been informed about the situation as a matter of course.

That the transport secretary could breeze into the transport committee, unaware of the ferry story, and try to blag and bullshit through his evidence tells us nothing good about our political culture.

The SNP moved from the fringes of Scottish politics to become the dominant force on the back of a story that all of the other political parties were corrupt and inept and a promise that it would do things differently.

A vote for the SNP was not, promised the late Alex Salmond back in 2007, a vote for independence but for good, competent government.

And, for a while, at least, it looked like Salmond might have kept his word. Under his first ministership, government competence remained detectable.

However, having made an extra special effort not to mess things up before 2014’s independence referendum, defeat saw the SNP take its eye off the ball.

At the same time, a new generation of enthusiastic (God help us) newcomers to politics, energised by the referendum campaign, rushed to be selected as SNP candidates.

Among these people were the likes of Collette Stevenson.

The SNP has always had a difficult relationship with policy issues beyond the constitution. Since independence trumps all else, there is little appetite among the activists-who-become-candidates to develop and explore ideas on issues from health to education. Why waste time on reforming an underperforming health service when there’s a nation to liberate?

Nationalist nostalgists talk of the independence referendum as a great celebration of democracy, an awakening of a people eager for change.

That’s certainly one version of events, but many No voters will tell you that it was a miserable, grinding experience.

Whatever one’s position on the joyousness or otherwise of the referendum campaign, it is undeniable that it continues to cast a shadow over our politics.

Activated by Alex Salmond’s fantasies, politicians like Collette Stevenson and Stephen Flynn rushed to serve their cause.

Now the rest of us are paying a heavy price for their ambition.