Scotland’s adventures in Green politics is coming to an end - John McLellan

​On top of a failure to accept support for separation had stalled, an obsession with minority identity issues and posturing environmental programmes has now done for two First Ministers, and the only likely candidate who doesn’t need reminding that Scotland is a conservative country, Kate Forbes, will probably lose for that very reason.

Personal religious devotion is apparently OK as long as it’s not Presbyterian.

Student union politicians sobbing on the radio might find it difficult to grasp, but forcing a narrow agenda on the majority, lecturing people on what to think and how to run their lives and threatening to up-end thousands of lives in the process, was bound to end in tears. Humza Yousaf just didn’t realise they would be his quite so soon.

Before he bowed to the inevitable, there was much bitterness from the jilted Greens about “capitulation to conservative factions”.

However, ending the Bute House Agreement was not a regressive step, but the first of many needed to give a clear majority of Scots, whether independence supporters or not, a devolved government which reflects their hopes and desires.

It’s just that Humza Yousaf was never the person to lead the reconstruction. That he genuinely believed he could still carry on with the Greens’ co-operation and was surprised by their reaction only shows how deluded he had become.

To deprive two erstwhile ministerial colleagues of their position and authority and their hefty salary top-up and expect them to take it on the chin also showed what can happen when executive power is handed to people with little experience of the world beyond party politics.

If his successor is John Swinney – the same John Swinney forced to quit 20 years ago – he would do well to heed the advice of former senior SNP adviser Geoff Aberdein and "get rid of the pish legislation … that means very little to the vast majority of the public”.

The problem was so much of the Sturgeon/Yousaf/Green programme meant an awful lot to thousands. Lorna Slater’s deposit return system was a narrow escape, although sadly not for those businesses which spent thousands preparing for the doomed scheme.

Having ditched the impossible target of 75 per cent carbon emissions reduction by 2030, top of the list must be bringing some common sense to the proposed Heat in Buildings regulations and recognise the ruinous reality of bringing the huge pre-war housing stock up to the standard Patrick Harvie demanded.

Voters in the middle will ultimately have their say, people who do not want to forgo their annual holiday to pay for a heat pump and who have never doubted a woman doesn’t have a penis.

As attention focuses on the SNP turmoil, let’s not forget the Greens are in trouble too.

Vicious internal vitriol was revealed in Sunday’s Herald newspaper, with Ross Greer MSP singled out as some sort of evil puppet-master who had sold the jersey.

But at the next Scottish election, although the SNP will lose constituencies, they will be compensated by more regional list seats and probably knock the Greens back to the one or two they had until 2015.

No wonder they were sobbing.