When I interviewed Jim Sillars earlier this month he made vivid use of ‘legacy’ language to describe the conduct of the Scottish Greens in government. The SNP grandee told me: “Patrick Harvie lives in a make-believe world of his own invention and I think Lorna Slater is wired to the moon.”

Unsurprisingly, the Scottish Greens chose not to respond to these spiky observations. Mr Sillars had only a few weeks to wait for some justification of them. It came in the form of Mr Harvie’s tour of the broadcasting studios last weekend when he refused to accept the main concerns expressed by Dr Hilary Cass in her review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People.

Among these were that the care for gender-distressed children in England had been compromised by unscientific bias and by some clinicians feeling pressured to adopt, unquestioningly, an affirmative approach. This had raised serious questions about the long-term physical and mental wellbeing of many vulnerable children and young people.

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Greens to back no confidence motion in Humza Yousaf

Yet, Mr Harvie and many of his supporters seemed to question the science and methodology of a report by the world-renowned paediatrician that was four years in the making. It seemed a remarkable position for a man whose party insists we all heed the science of Climate Emergency.

A few days later, his Scottish Greens’ ministerial colleague, Lorna Slater – inconsolable at being forced out of Government by Humza’s late discovery of his spinal column – seemed animated at the injustice of it all. Ms Slater accused Mr Yousaf of being “weak” and said that his decision to jettison the Bute House Agreement had been “an act of political cowardice by the SNP”.

It seemed then that Jim Sillars’ colourful descriptions of this pair hadn’t been so quirky after all. In truth though, the most egregious act of cowardice committed by the SNP in government was concluding the Bute House Agreement in 2021.

Thus, they bought an easy life by bribing a failed student activist cell, which had never won any election in any jurisdiction, with a couple of bouncy castle departments that seemed to have been influenced by Rufus T Firefly’s government of Freedonia.

Mr Yousaf has immediately dusted these moonbeam jobs into other departments Alex Salmond’s first minority SNP administration governed well by deploying creativity, smartness and intellectual flexibility to secure the passage of its annual budgets. The Sturgeon/Yousaf era has been the triumph of mediocrity in which a dismal cast of third-raters get to their feet in Holyrood each week and take a wrecking-ball to the reputation of our education system each time they open their mouths.

The Scottish Greens in government approached the Scottish budget in the same way as contestants laying waste to food shelves in a game of Supermarket Sweep. Hundreds of millions of pounds were squandered in an assortment of failed enterprises borrowed from the survivalist sects of America’s banjo states: the Deposit Return scheme; a Heat pumps and Energy scheme; cycle lanes, more National Parks. None were devised to improve the life chances of people in Scotland’s poorest communities.

Under the ruinous influence of the Scottish Greens the SNP has embarked on an economically insane approach to North Sea energy. Where were they expecting the finance to fund capital investment in a new Scottish economy to come from?

As Mr Sillars pointed out this month, the Clair oilfield, west of Shetland has more than 40 years of development potential, giving the big lie to Unionists’ claims in 2014 that the North Sea was finished. “The black stuff is where the wealth lies,” said Mr Sillars. Not according to the Scottish Greens, though. To them it lies in heat pumps and empty ginger bottles.

So let there be no doubt that Humza Yousaf is well rid of this political end-of-the-pier show. The political class who dined richly on this psycho-twinning arrangement all now talk about the need for Mr Yousaf to “re-set” and “re-calibrate” his government following the end of the Bute House Agreement. It’s expressed in a way that suggests he can somehow recover from his catastrophic dalliance with the Greens. He can’t.

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Analysis: Humza Yousaf's grip on power heads to endgame

Right up until Thursday afternoon he’d been extolling the virtues of the Scottish Greens in government, seemingly impervious to the entreaties of the party’s wisest voices to ditch them. These had become more intense as Mr Harvie proceeded with his inchoate assault on the Cass Review.

What had happened in the twilight hours of Wednesday evening that forced the First Minister to summon an emergency cabinet meeting early on Thursday morning? Had it been made clear to him that several of his backbenchers were considering supporting Alba's Ash Regan’s vote of no-confidence in Mr Harvie?

Mr Yousaf, like his former Green colleagues, is busy re-drafting the short history of the world’s most unsuccessful coalition. It’s easily remembered though, that both of his rivals in last year’s party leadership contest were pledged to end the baleful influence of the Scottish Greens before they caused much more damage to the cause of independence and authentically progressive politics. Fergus Ewing was suspended last year for advocating for the course of action just taken by his feckless boss.

Mr Yousaf, still intoxicated by the false glamour of his predecessor, refused to heed the warnings. It’s been a failure that’s come to characterise the entirety of his abject leadership.

He now encounters a suite of serious challenges all gathering at the same time and all having done so owing to his complacency; his failure of leadership and his Sturgeonesque tendency to dismiss wise counsel.

His speeches are increasingly shrill and contrived; his landmark policies are good for nothing more than jokes in this year’s Christmas pantomimes and any grip he ever had over his backbenchers is now loosening. It was inevitable that he would pay a price for marginalising the brightest and the most experienced politicians in the party and they’ve all been talking to each other.

There’s a feeling among some in this group that removing Mr Yousaf may not, of itself, be sufficient to stave off defeat now or at the 2026 Holyrood election and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing.

There’s an increasingly implacable feeling too that if Mr Yousaf is removed almost his entire cabinet should be gone too. And that there must be a day of reckoning for the Matalan brigade on the SNP’s sprawling payroll.

If it falls to Ash Regan to decide the fate of Mr Yousaf in a no-confidence vote she may be tempted by another thought, expressed by others: that a period in opposition may be required to bring the party back in touch with its core support and its core purpose: the eternal struggle for Scottish independence.