John Swinney is the politician formerly known as ‘Honest John’ – though after a re-brand he is now ‘full-on John’.
It’s easy to lose track of these attempts at an image makeover – mind you, it’s difficult to know what, if anything, has changed.
He has always presented himself as a moderate in a party not known for its measured approach – more Reggie Perrin than Che Guevara.
There is the odd moment when the mask slips and his cool is lost, usually when he’s rattled during Holyrood showdowns with Russell Findlay.
The First Minister is keen to paint himself as a gradualist on independence, as opposed to a fundamentalist who wants it now, at any price.
Nicola Sturgeon would summon the media to Bute House roughly every five minutes to demand a referendum – not that it ever worked.
Ultimately, of course, she backed her party into a corner by going to court in a bid to hold a vote on breaking up Britain, only to be told it would be unlawful.
For hardcore separatists itching to get back to the rallies and marches, the pace of progress is glacial, as if the SNP has forgotten what it’s for.
There were only a few grudging mentions of its great project in the woeful programme for government, along with a promise to publish yet another of those pitiful ‘papers’ on the economy of an independent Scotland.
More civil service time will be lost to this futile exercise in fantasy politics, of a kind of that would be too far-fetched even for JRR Tolkien.
But it’s clear that Mr Swinney is pursuing what he sees as a ‘softly-softly’ strategy to avoid giving the impression that he leads a group of radicals.
The problem is that sooner or later, he has to show his hand – and toss some red meat to the powerbase who want to know about his grand plan, assuming he has one.
Pressed on the issue at the weekend, Mr Swinney said tearing Scotland out of the UK would be ‘central’ to the SNP’s Holyrood election campaign.
In fact, the case for independence will ‘run through many of the arguments that [he will] make in the course of the next 12 months’ – you have been warned…
Mr Swinney said the SNP is ‘now able to illustrate why Scotland would be better off with independence, because we are seeing firsthand the actions of a Labour government in Westminster following on from a Tory government’.
The lack of any viable legal means to achieve a referendum without UK Government consent is a hitch in the cunning plan, Mr Swinney conceded, but he hopes to ‘bring people together sufficiently so there’s a compelling voice for independence in Scotland’.
Yesterday he said there will be another referendum on independence while he is leader – suggesting it may be time for him to lie down in a darkened room with a cold flannel on his forehead.
In electioneering mode, Mr Swinney is doubling down on this bonkers rhetoric, though he has been determined to underline his moderate credentials until now.
Anyone who has been paying attention to his remarkable career – spreading chaos in every brief he has held – will find this hard to swallow.
Four years ago, as the Covid death toll mounted, Mr Swinney insisted that the battle against coronavirus shouldn’t put a stop to plans for another independence referendum.
Mr Swinney, then Deputy First Minister, concluded that ‘it would give us an opportunity to decide on our constitutional future and to determine the nature of our economy – it’s a critical response to Covid’.
His old boss Ms Sturgeon insisted back in June 2020 that ‘we’re not dealing with politics at the moment’, only a few hours after the Cabinet had agreed that ‘consideration should be given to restarting work on independence’.
Let’s face it – even as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode over the horizon, Mr Swinney would be touring TV studios to bleat on about the SNP’s separatist fixation.
There’s no crisis that it wouldn’t exploit to further its own narrow agenda, not even a global pandemic which at the time had reduced the NHS to its knees.
It hasn’t recovered despite countless remobilisation plans drafted by successive hapless health ministers, in between limo rides to football matches and running up gargantuan data-roaming bills at taxpayers’ expense.
As we revealed yesterday, minibuses are being used instead of properly equipped and crewed ambulances to respond to 999 calls.
In August last year, Mr Swinney told his party to ‘redouble’ its push for independence – despite an election rout which saw it lose 39 of 48 seats as fed-up voters switched to Labour.
His solution was to talk even more about the constitution, while at the same time claiming his government was ‘laser-focused’ on people’s priorities.
That drubbing was seen as a product of the SNP’s abysmal performance on everything from ferries to a failing NHS, and a state education system plagued by lawless classrooms and botched curricular reform.
Mr Swinney, in his former role as Education Secretary, was the minister who authorised the use of an algorithm which at a stroke downgraded the results of thousands of pupils after exams were ditched during the Covid pandemic – before executing the sharpest of U-turns.
He’s also the politician who championed the Orwellian Named Person scheme, denouncing its many critics, before scrapping it (but only after it had cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds).
And he professed to believe that another bout of constitutional navel-gazing, accompanied by the psychodrama of a second referendum, was an appropriate – indeed necessary – response to a public health emergency.
Together with profound incompetence, there’s a track record of zealotry bubbling just below the surface of ‘Full-on John’ – however much he tries to persuade us of his cool head and listening ear.
Independence is snake oil peddled by a salesman who lost his last shred of credibility long ago.
Mr Swinney pays lip service to the importance of ‘delivery’ in the run-up to polling day next year.
But his party has a history of delivering nothing more than failure, division and dysfunction.
Most Scots don’t want yet more circular debate about the constitution – they want prompt NHS treatment and a decent education for their kids.
And they know that dismantling the United Kingdom would be a gift for Putin and other tyrants who long to see our power diminished.
Don’t buy Mr Swinney’s act – he’s an obsessive just like his predecessor and his colleagues, with a Messianic devotion to the only cause which drives the SNP – regardless of the repercussions for the country it’s supposed to be governing.