There has never been a more opportune time, surely, for Unionists in Scotland to intrude as brutally as possible into the private grief of the SNP. Indeed, one might well ask if an argument can still be made for Scottish independence now that the United Kingdom has stepped in so forcefully and, yes, benevolently, to rescue Scotland's two main banks from themselves. “Thank God for the Union,” RBS, HBOS and their thousands of employees, savers and mortgage-holders are now entitled to say.

Don't expect any such gratitude from Alex Salmond and his party, whose separatist fantasies have been exposed. Yesterday, as the world and his wife queued up to comment on these epochal times for Scotland's banks, it took the SNP administration at Holyrood almost six hours to say anything after the Government's stabilisation announcement.

When it finally came it amounted to little more than another piece of attention-seeking from Mr Salmond, whose attempts in recent days to muscle his way into the biggest financial story to hit Scotland in generations have verged on the pathetic.

The SNP preferred, on this day of days for the Scottish economy, to issue press statements about, for example, some manufactured slight that the UK Government had supposedly committed against Gaelic broadcasting. The lack of statesmanship was palpable.

We should not have been surprised. When a blind man has his stick kicked away all he can do is whirl about in confusion. The confusion and consternation at the heart of Alex Salmond's government yesterday was awesome and yet comic at the same time.

Not that Mr Salmond will think any less of himself. This, after all, is a man who when other UK politicians last weekend were spending their time attempting to seek consensus to launch a lifeboat for RBS and HBOS, preferred to use the media to whinge on about an alleged £1billion which the wicked UK Government (yes, that's the same wicked UK Government which has bailed out our banks to the tune of more than £30billion) was withholding from Scotland.

Thanks to a timid Scottish media he was allowed to get away with it. No one it seems dared raise the question of why a man who occupies the post of the First Minister, with all the sense of responsibility and trust that office is supposed to bestow on the holder, indulged in such blatant political opportunism at a time when the very core of the Scottish economy was up for grabs. Mr Salmond's intervention was almost as offensive as it was irrelevant and amounted to no more than a mere massaging of his own ego.

What price now his planned referendum on Scottish independence in 2010? Is he really proposing to go to the Scottish people and try to persuade them that their country should opt out of a Union that has just saved it from a banking Armageddon? Should he not accept for now that those who have pursued the case for the Union over the years and have been accused by Nationalists of, among other things, wanting to hold the country back, were the true friends of Scotland?

If Mr Salmond is going to persist then he would be better employed finding a new set of arguments because the ones he has been using for as long as this writer cares to remember now lie shot to pieces on the constitutional battlefield.

But, of course, Mr Salmond has never knowingly undersold himself or come close to admitting that he got it wrong and we should not hold our breath this time. The headline “Salmond admits error of his ways” will have to wait.

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