“We must and we will find another democratic, lawful means for Scottish people to express their will,” Nicola Sturgeon told reporters. And, she didn’t add, for them to keep expressing it until they express the right answer.

Sturgeon no more needs an excuse to discuss independence than she does to get dressed in the morning, but the particular reason on Wednesday was the Supreme Court’s ruling that the government in Edinburgh can’t call a referendum without the agreement of the government in London. The ruling, to Sturgeon’s mind, only made the case for independence stronger. It would be interesting to know whether, had the case gone the other way, she would have felt this made the case for independence weaker. 

At root, Sturgeon’s case is that the Scottish people made a historic error in rejecting independence, and that they should now be given a chance to correct it. It was a cry that her MPs duly took in Westminster.

“He has no right to deny democracy to the people of Scotland,” SNP leader Ian Blackford said of Rishi Sunak. To argue that accepting the result of a clear vote less than a decade ago means you’re anti-democratic might seem a bit of a stretch, but not to the SNP and their supporters. He would later accuse his opponents of “thoughtless triumphalism”.

The Tory approach to the nationalists has shifted under the latest management. Boris Johnson used to enjoy goading the SNP, and from their point of view, it probably did no harm to have endless video clips of an old Etonian getting the name of their party wrong and generally being patronising. 

Rishi Sunak takes a different approach

Rishi Sunak takes a different approach. Perhaps he doesn’t feel he has the heft to talk down to Blackford. Perhaps he just feels bombast is counterproductive. Instead he went for emollience. “I think that the people of Scotland want us to be working on fixing the major challenges that we collectively face,” he said, politely. 

Blackford tried again. The people of Scotland are crying out for a referendum, he said, in the face of the available evidence. “Since 2014, the Scottish National Party has won eight elections in a row!” he declared, in what was presumably an example of thoughtful triumphalism. We wondered how Scots have time to do anything else, what with all this voting. Sunak, he pointed out, hadn’t even won the Tory leadership contest. 

In Sunak’s place, Johnson would have swung at something like this with all his might, with an answer taking in the Brexit referendum, the 19 billion people he believes voted personally for him, and probably his personal claim to Scotland’s throne. He would have mocked Blackford for only liking referendums when he got the result he wanted, and thrown in a couple of references to his “humble croft” — the SNP leader used to be an investment banker — for good measure. 

Not Sunak. He was so soothing you could have used him to treat nappy rash. As the PMQs session went on, it became clear that SNP MPs had somehow secured most of the speaking slots. They used these for a sort of Single Transferable Question, repeating the same point again and again, and to each the prime minister replied with little details about the good that UK government money was doing in their constituency, and his hope that they might be able to find more common ground. It must have been terribly frustrating for the Nats. By this stage, Johnson would have said something so provocative that Sturgeon would have been able to get support for a unilateral declaration of independence. 

It was interesting, during these exchanges and then the urgent question afterwards, to contemplate the SNP benches. When they arrived in force in 2015 there were great claims that the Nat wave would change Westminster. They seemed to have utter discipline, never rebelling or even speaking out of turn. Seven years later, they have had schism and scandals, but more than that, they behave just like other MPs, jeering and gesturing with the best of them. When someone else mentioned the troubles in Scotland’s health service, one SNP frontbencher mimed a big yawn, as though questions of being able to see a doctor were secondary to the great question of another referendum. Westminster, it turns out, has changed them.

I had to leave shortly afterwards, as I was appearing before a Parliamentary committee. The Procedure Committee is very much Off Broadway as such things go, but I can dream that one day it will be me, not Jeremy Hunt, who is giving evidence to the Treasury Committee. The session was on whether and how MPs should amend the record when they get things wrong in Parliament. 

It was a friendly affair, with lots of encouraging smiles from our interrogators. Afterwards one of the committee members told me how pleased he was that I agreed with him about something. This was unfortunate as I was fairly sure I’d been saying the opposite. It’s complicated stuff, this business of correcting other people’s mistakes.