I’m guessing those who didn’t get the message were senior SNP politicians and members of the party’s ruling national executive committee. For them, the alarm bells should have sounded weeks ago and the text warning about an existential crisis should have read “this is not a rehearsal”.

Westminster leader Stephen Flynn appears to have received the message. Flynn, who wrestled the crown from Ian Blackford at Westminster, provided the latest twist to the saga, saying he did not know until two months into his tenure that the party was financially adrift. With some candour, he admitted that if the SNP Westminster group do not appoint auditors by May 31, staff jobs will be at risk.

Keith Brown, the deputy leader of the party, revealed at the weekend that even he was kept in the dark about the party’s auditors going overboard until last month. Yet Mr Brown breezily maintained that the SNP is the most transparent political party on Earth. Clearly, he is one who did not get the phone alert telling him planet SNP is ablaze.

The culture of secrecy with which the SNP leadership ran the party and the country is beginning to unravel and has months to run. A police inquiry which burst into life with a blue forensics tent in the suburban garden of the Sturgeon-Murrell household has now become a hunt for “burner” phones – a term more commonly associated with television gangster crime dramas – which are untraceable, throwaway mobiles.

There is no human fire extinguisher in the SNP capable of dealing with this conflagration. Humza Yousaf reached for the reset button on the sprinkler system last Tuesday, only to discover that he needs a bigger button. As the First Minister prepared to set out his legislative platform for the next three years of the Scottish Parliament, attention was all on the absence in the chamber of his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon and the arrest of Colin Beattie, the long-time SNP treasurer.

Mr Beattie was detained for the statutory 12-hour period that Peter Murrell was held for two weeks earlier in connection with the ongoing police investigation into SNP finances. Mr Beattie, like Mr Murrell, was later released without charge. The questions on everyone’s lips now are who will be arrested in the next episode of this police procedural thriller and when will Ms Sturgeon turn up for the day job of representing her constituents in parliament?

Whether Glasgow Southside is represented in parliament or not, there are growing questions for the continuity First Minister on whether his predecessor should be suspended from the party, as others have been when caught up in controversy. After that notorious video leak of Ms Sturgeon telling the party’s governing committee in 2021 that the SNP had “never been in a stronger financial position”, more than eyebrows were raised.

A rabbit caught in the headlights? Humza Yousaf is struggling as the bad news just keeps coming (Picture:Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Two months after she made that statement, two members of the national executive committee quit over the lack of financial transparency, concerns were raised about the location of more than £600,000 raised in donations for a referendum campaign which never happened, and the inexplicable, and unreported at the time, loan of £107,620 which Mr Murrell extended to the party to help out with “cash flow”.

And so, via impounded motorhomes, the search for phone sim cards, pens, jewellery and, reportedly, a fridge freezer, by the way of falsified membership figures and multiple resignations, we end up where we are now. Operation Branchform, the unlikely name for this police investigation could be hastily rescripted as a spoof version of Happy Valley were the implications for Scottish democracy not so grave.

Mr Yousaf must be wishing the whole series would be issued as a box set so that the pain could come as one big punch in the face rather than the bed of nails he must lie on. “Of course I am surprised when one of my colleagues has been arrested,” he told reporters in one of these regular rabbit-in-the-headlights appearances in front of the Holyrood press pack, thus providing at least one line of dialogue which will be kept in the soon-to-be written drama script.

Lino – the acronym for “leader in name only”, as Mr Yousaf is now being known after inheriting the title from Theresa May – tried his government programme launch last week which can best be described as having crashed on take-off. Events like losing a treasurer, which meant Mr Yousaf himself briefly taking on the post, kind of have the habit of throwing the best politicians off their stride. Let’s just say the First Minister didn’t get up to walking speed last week.

A few rehashed policies from years ago, a few borrowed Kate Forbes’ clothes and a few commitments to dump or delay the legacy of “she who will not appear” and that was it. Oh, the bottle deposit return scheme is being delayed, what a surprise, and there were a few warm, or were they weasel, words on not going ahead but also going ahead with the hated Green proposals for highly protected marine areas.

There were over 2,000 responses to the first consultation on the SNP/Green plans to close down whole coastal communities by virtually banning any activity at sea. It appears that the angry message from coastal and island communities might just have penetrated, even if the emergency text message telling Mr Yousaf that the end is nigh has not yet arrived.

Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health

SNP turmoil: Humza Yousaf's new government crashes on take-off as everyone starts to get the message about party's existential crisis – Jackie Baillie

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