But the biggest test

is arguably the proposed Named Person legislation.

The deeply flawed plan to foist a state guardian on every child in the land could see the authority of parents undermined and genuinely at-risk children put in further danger as scant social work resources are deployed to chase up trivial issues with capable families.

Genuine fears about the plans from across the spectrum have been brushed aside by the SNP.

It insists all warnings are just so much politically motivated sniping – a senior SNP figure reached for the big box of politicians’ cliches on Friday and tried to say the media were somehow authors of complaints about the project.

With a startling lack of shame, the party spin doctors have even tried to say that state snoopers will be akin to school guidance teachers. No teacher was ever empowered to poke their nose into family life in the way Named Persons will.

Miss Sturgeon herself has said concerns – from parents and professionals – about the intrusive legislation are ‘unfounded’.

And in a display of the same petulance that dogged her first two years as First Minister, she declared she was ‘not going to be thwarted in my determination to govern in the interests of the country as a whole’.

It was that arrogant assumption that she speaks for all of Scotland when so very many voted against her that cost her so dearly at the ballot box.

The contrast with Miss Davidson could not be clearer. Instead of bombastic declarations of war, the Tory leader has said: ‘I fully understand that I am being put on probation by an awful lot of people who have never voted Conservative before.’

There speaks a woman who realises she has been given a mandate by a broad section of Scots who want to see the worst excesses of a rampant SNP pegged back.

It will not be easy to winkle the SNP out of its entrenched positions but if anyone can manage the trick it’s Ruth and a powerful new force of Tories.