Euan McColm: Nicola Sturgeon's gender reform omnishambles is an open goal for Alex Salmond

When First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s plan to make it easier for people to change their gender in law blew up in her face, throwing her into a political crisis of her own reckless creation, it was hardly surprising that Alex Salmond had something to say on the matter.

Sturgeon’s mentor-turned-mortal-enemy raged against his protégé, accusing her of “throwing away” momentum for independence with a “daft ideology… imperfectly understood by its proponents in Scotland”. This, said the former leader of the SNP, who now heads the Alba party, bordered on the totally absurd. Sturgeon was guilty of allowing “self-indulgent nonsense” to damage the independence cause.

Asked, during a routine press conference about a poll showing support for both independence and the SNP had fallen, Sturgeon was unrepentant. As things stood, the survey still suggested her party would win another landslide if there was an election any time soon.

Sturgeon is almost certainly correct. After all, for nationalist voters, the constitutional question trumps all else. The SNP’s disastrous stewardship of the NHS, its mismanagement of the education system, and a series of scandals involving ministers and other senior figures have not persuaded almost half of Scottish voters to abandon Sturgeon’s party and there is no reason to believe her catastrophic handling of reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) will change those minds.

Once the sure-footed leader of the SNP and pro-independence movement, Nicola Sturgeon now looks tired and out of ideas. Picture: Jane Barlow/AP

However, maintaining the support of a minority of Scots – no matter how large that group might be – is not going to win independence and so Salmond’s criticism was valid.

Eight and a half years after the Yes campaign was defeated in the independence referendum, Sturgeon has failed to move things forward.

Increasingly distant and short-tempered, the First Minister is stuck. And she’s making a series of bad calls that have some SNP colleagues wondering whether it’s time she moved on and gave someone else a crack.

There is growing disquiet in her party about the fall-out from reform of the GRA. When the UK Government announced its decision to block the legislation on the grounds that the introduction of self-ID for those wishing to have a change of gender legally recognised would negatively impact on the Equality Act, Sturgeon set the scene for a Supreme Court clash with Westminster during which she would fight to protect democracy.

Since the case of Isla Bryson – who, as Adam Graham. raped two women – became public, many of the First Minister’s loyal colleagues are less enthusiastic about her proposed legal crusade.

“I think,” one told me, “She is determined to go ahead with the court action even though the whole thing’s been a disaster for us. Ideally, she’d get us off this subject and back on to something that might win us some new voters.”

Sturgeon’s ongoing refusal to say whether she considers Bryson/Graham a man of a woman is another cause of frustration in her party’s ranks.

One elected member said: “Every time she refuses to answer that question, voters hear her being unable or unwilling to call a rapist a man. That’s an insane position to have got yourself into.”

But it is not just on the matter of gender recognition where Sturgeon has colleagues questioning her judgement.

When she announced last year that she intended to treat the next General Election as a “de facto” referendum on independence, reaction among SNP members was divided. A public show of unity among parliamentarians concealed deep concerns among some that Sturgeon had set them on a Kamikaze mission. Winning more than half the popular vote would be incredibly difficult, they reasoned, and even if the party achieved this feat, the UK government was under no obligation to recognise the result as a mandate for independence talks.

Those frustrations have now bubbled to the surface.

The MP Stewart McDonald – generally considered a Sturgeon loyalist – last week published a document on the subject, which is due for consideration at a special conference next month.

In the document, McDonald argues that not only does the party face the prospect of the UK Government rejecting the call for the election to be treated like a referendum but that – if it does win more than half of all votes – it will come under pressure from supporters to take action which would damage the cause. While the Prime Minister of the day would refuse to play ball, the leadership of the independence movement and the Scottish Government would face “all manner of unreasonable expectations and demands… such as calls for a unilateral declaration of independence.”

This, warns McDonald, would diminish the standing of the independence movement with both the Scottish electorate and “international partners”.

Against this backdrop of chaos, Sturgeon’s government continues to consult on a possible ban on alcohol advertising.

How bizarre that the producers of Scotch Whisky – an internationally recognised symbol of Scottish tradition and manufacturing excellence – may be forbidden to market their product to consumers in this country.

Across a range of issues, Sturgeon’s instincts seems to be driving her to make absolutely avoidable mistakes.

More than eight years into her First Ministership, her list of achievements stretches little further than “kept the independence movement stuck in a rut”.

And so, while Sturgeon was quite right to say that the SNP would win an election if one were to be called tomorrow, it’s not entirely clear that she knows what she would do with another term in office.

Once the sure-footed, clear-headed leader of the SNP and the wider pro-independence movement, Nicola Sturgeon now looks tired and out of ideas. Her judgement is all over the place and each new crisis in which she finds herself embroiled is entirely of her own making.