At the last general election, less than five years ago, they scored a landslide, securing 73% of their nation's seats in the Westminster parliament. They’ve governed that nation since 2007 and were most recently reelected as by far their own parliament's largest party in October 2021.

Today, things are very different for the Scottish Nationalists.

The leader who took them to their most recent victories resigned with great dignity, very shortly before she would almost certainly have had to resign in disgrace.

Nicola Sturgeon quit on 28 March 2023. A week later, her husband – her party’s former chief executive – was arrested and their home was searched by the police. She was herself arrested and questioned two months later.

Last month, her husband was formally charged with the embezzlement of funds from the SNP.

Ms. Sturgeon’s own last years in power had also been dogged by allegations that senior members of her party had been involved in a conspiracy to remove her predecessor from public life and get him sent to prison – allegations made shortly before he moved across to lead a rival political party.

Her successor proved possibly even less successful. One of his rivals defected to that other nationalist party. He courted controversy with a range of bravely unpopular policy choices. And, last month, he ended his coalition with the Green Party, who had been about to vote on leaving their alliance with the SNP, whom they accused of betraying environmental policy commitments.

This resulted in Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, facing the threat of a vote of no confidence in the Scottish parliament at the end of last month, a vote he would only have been able to survive by getting that defector back on board, in a humiliating capitulation to the demands of one of his party’s more notorious renegades. That was something which, when it came to it, his political pride wouldn’t allow him to do.

Two weeks ago, he quit, clearly in a bid to maintain some shreds of dignity, and to jump before he was pushed – before, that is, he was unceremoniously tossed out onto the street like a Glaswegian merrymaker’s half-eaten kebab late on a rainy Saturday night.

The best his party could find to replace him was a former deputy leader who had previously resisted calls to step up to its top job, an old trooper who was eventually willing to come out of semi-retirement in the hour of the SNP’s greatest need.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has, as a result of this epic farce, gained an opportunity to re-establish its foothold in its traditional heartlands north of the border, an advantage it had lost under its previous leadership. Having not long since lagged 32 points behind the SNP in the polls, it has now closed that gap to zero.

The SNP’s meteoric fall since the height of its popularity in December 2019 seems extraordinary, and is only eclipsed by the fate of the Conservative Party leader who won that general election by a landslide. That man was of course Boris Johnson. He was of course out of Downing Street less than three years after his own electoral triumph.

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His successor’s career was even shorter as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Liz Truss’s own successor has lasted a lot longer than her seven weeks at Number 10, but he hasn’t exactly brought political stability to the country.

The situation in Scotland may look utterly chaotic. But it’s hardly as catastrophic as the mess down south.

The Nats can take the high road and the Tories the low road, but it looks like they may both be headed into the wilderness.

And, sadly, it feels like they’ve been doing their best to take their nations into oblivion with them.

At local elections just three years ago, the Conservatives had gained more than 200 council seats and Labour had lost more than 300. The picture was very different at the local elections which ran at the start of this month.

A few days before those elections, a Conservative MP had defected to Labour. Being a medical doctor, he'd suggested that he couldn’t remain in a party that had done so much damage to the country’s health service, and in doing so was able to rebrand himself as one of the more decent rodents leaping from the sinking ship.

Already 20 points behind Labour in the polls, this month’s local election results showed that the Conservatives were, as leading psephologist John Curtice supposed, in “deep trouble”. Those results must, in the words of the BBC’s political editor, have given the Tories “the heebie-jeebies”. In short, they’d have given the blues the blues.

“We’re doomed”, declared the Sunday Express, as the front page of that right-wing tabloid denounced Rishi Sunak as a “lame duck PM”.

Labour gained nearly 200 council seats and the Conservatives lost nearly 500. Securing fewer than half the total number of seats won by Labour, the Tories were pushed into third place by the Liberal Democrats.

Labour mayors kept their jobs in most major cities, including London, where incumbent Sadiq Khan increased his proportional lead over his Conservative opponent.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary by-election also held that day saw a massive 26 per cent swing to Labour from the Conservatives, the third biggest swing at a by-election since the Second World War.

If Labour maintains that current momentum across Britain – both north and south of the border – all the way to the national polls later this year, the result won’t simply be a landslide. The impacts upon the country’s political landscape could prove nothing short of seismic.

Just last week, a second Conservative MP defected to Labour, calling her old party incompetent and divisive. This may well be the shape of things to come.