Even when Macintosh is in his seat, the chair is empty...

THIS week, a report concluded that SNP ministers had okayed £9billion worth of PFI contracts without understanding them.

This was a scandal and there was no getting out of it for nicola Sturgeon.

Step forward richard Leonard, and onto a rake. When Sturgeon reminded the Labour leader at First Minister’s Questions that his party had introduced PFI, he leapt to his feet, seized a sheaf of papers and announced: ‘I anticipated how the First Minister might respond to my first question, so I went to look at a report I wrote 25 years ago.’

He read from his papers, triumphantly. He had called PFI ‘a con trick’, ‘a buy-now-pay-later mirage’, in which ‘the taxpayer... will simply pay more in the end’. It was ‘smart accountancy but bad economics’. He anticipated this? And thought this was a good answer?

A look of wonderment spread across Sturgeon’s face. She looked like those lottery winners you see on the news who still can’t believe their luck. Behind her, nationalist MSPs howled and heckled until it was no longer possible to hear Leonard.

What relief this brought Labour was short-lived as the Presiding officer instructed hecklers to ‘treat each other with respect... with less of this barracking’.

They barracked through every second of his reprimand. Ken Macintosh is a good man but never has a presiding officer exerted less authority over the chamber. even when he’s in his seat, the chair is empty.

Beside Leonard, Iain gray’s complexion had gone through all 50 shades of his surname, and he probably wished he had a ballgag on hand for his leader. A funereal silence gripped the benches behind. They understood the implication of what Leonard was saying.

STURGEON understood too, and her voice dripped with cruel joy: ‘richard Leonard – bless – wrote a report 25 years ago. Is it not a shame the Labour governments that followed ignored everything he said? It took an SnP government to act.’

now it dawned on Leonard what he’d done. In trying to entrap Sturgeon, he’d snared himself. He took an SnP scandal and made it about Labour’s failings and his insignificance in his own party. It was like an episode of Poirot in reverse.

Leonard fingered the culprit, tripped over the body, clocked himself with the candlestick and confessed to the murder. The more he tried to recover, the louder the laughter. ‘I may be enjoying myself too much,’ Sturgeon chimed in. In those excruciating minutes, as his opponents’ cackles grew higher and his comrades’ heads sunk lower, I changed my mind about mercy killing. Surely it would be more compassionate for Jackie Baillie to take him away to live on a farm with all the other Labour leaders.

With one last, limp swing, he scolded Sturgeon for an upcoming speech on independence to ‘her party faithful’. She backhanded him: ‘richard Leonard should just be relieved that he is not speaking to his own party faithful tomorrow, because they would be in despair.’ If Leonard isn’t on the SnP payroll, he’s being done out of a fortune.

Patrick Harvie told the First Minister next week’s Budget had to put public transport ahead of road capacity and she told him there would be ‘the right balance’.

This is the greens’ problem under Harvie’s constitution-first leadership. They’re always going to vote for SnP budgets, the SnP knows this, and they have little leverage.

Derek Mackay could build an oil rig on the roof of Holyrood paid for with a tax on vegans and the greens would dutifully vote. They have turned into a mini-me SnP and for what? A token here and a head-pat there. richard Leonard’s not the only leader to humiliate his party.