here can’t be many occasions when a committee session of the Scottish parliament has garnered Netflix-style viewing figures. Today it wasn’t just the political classes who were transfixed by the testimony given by the former first minister Alex Salmond. The committee was examining how and why the Scottish government erred in its investigation into allegations of sexual harassment involving Salmond – which cost the Scottish taxpayer substantially north of £500,000 when the process was judged to be “unlawful, unfair, and tainted by apparent bias”. (Subsequently, a criminal case was brought involving some 14 charges, on all of which Salmond was acquitted.) Despite the months of bitter in-fighting, the end game of this psychodrama has only reached half time. Nicola Sturgeon, the current first minister, will take the same chair under the same oath next week. She will do so after her one-time mentor has charged her with breaking the ministerial code, charged the government’s permanent secretary, Leslie Evans, with breaking the civil service code, and implied that the lord advocate, James Wolffe – the government’s legal adviser – allowed the Crown Office to redact sections of Salmond’s evidence merely to protect the Sturgeon and her government. Two threads ran damagingly through Salmond’s testimony. The first was his constant assertion that he was being prevented from providing evidence to back up his assertions by improper use of contempt of court laws, and second was his insistence that the leadership of Scotland’s key institutions was not fit for purpose. He called for the lord advocate to “consider his position” and repeatedly accused the permanent secretary of improperly abusing her powers. But he stopped short of demanding that Sturgeon resign if found to have breachedthe ministerial code. Yet, while the focus of commentary on what Salmond described as a two and a half year personal “nightmare” has invariably revolved around Sturgeon and her political future, the collateral damage of this increasingly bitter feud has fallen on the wider Scottish independence movement. More than 20 separate polls have suggested that most of Scotland’s electorate now favour a break from the UK. The boost in the yes to independence camp comes from several sources. One is obviously the popularity of Sturgeon who, despite all the accusations, again had an enviable personal rating of plus-32 in a survey this week. Then there are the remainers who voted no in 2014 having been assured that voting yes would lose them their European citizenship. (Scotland voted almost two to one to remain.) And, not at all incidentally, Boris Johnson and his ministerial team are neither admired nor trusted across a wide spectrum of Scottish life – especially after his overheard comment that devolution had been “disastrous” for Scotland. The Holyrood elections on 6 May are almost certain to go ahead. Until now, polling has suggested either that the SNP was in line for a straight parliamentary majority, or would have a de facto one with the support of the Greens. The greatest danger to either scenario for the SNP does not come from the two larger opposition parties. Labour is still in the process of electing its fifth leader since the 2014 referendum. The Tories’ leader, MP Douglas Ross, doesn’t even sit in Holyrood and his stand-in, the combative Ruth Davidson, is about to depart for the Lords. The SNP’s fear must now be that its core support chooses to stay at home, and voter apathy becomes the independence movement’s principal enemy. In fact, there are other fault lines in the SNP unconnected to the Salmond/Sturgeon soap opera. The most constant is the sense that, while the party under Salmond was fairly gung-ho about pursuing independence, Sturgeon – who has won several elections – is ultra-cautious and reluctant to proceed without specific permission from Westminster. Both camps have their adherents; both are conducting open warfare on social media. Yet these issues have become less gripping to the pro-independence faithful, both in and out of the SNP, than the extraordinary events unfolding in a Holyrood committee room. There have been many dramas in the 22-year life of the Scottish parliament. It lost Donald Dewar, its first “first minister”, to sudden death within a year of its opening. The seemingly impregnable Labour party all but imploded in the 2015 general election, losing all but one of its 41 seats. The Tory party has, like Labour, had a succession of Scottish leaders, but its most effective – the once remain-supporting, Boris Johnson-disparaging Davidson– has accepted a peerage from him. Yet nothing has so shaken Holyrood to its elegant modern rafters as the two most iconic figures in the SNP going from best friends to mortal enemies. Only time will tell whether, in attacking themselves, they end up destroying the one cause they’ve both always believed in. • Ruth Wishart is a Scottish freelance columnist and broadcaster