Tail docking is illegal in this country unless there is a compelling reason to do it. While it is something the Scottish Greens would never agree with, I know there are many in the SNP who feel it is time to look for a dispensation to dock their tail. Time to ditch the Scottish Greens, who wag the SNP dog.

Our beleaguered First Minister Humza Yousaf does not have his troubles to seek. The continuity candidate has inherited so much continuous scandal from his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon he’s felt the need to rehire Kevin Pringle – once Alex Salmond’s right-hand man. Talented as Mr Pringle may be, I am not sure what kind of continuity that back-to-the-future move suggests.

Yet some of Mr Yousaf’s worst problems are caused by his present coalition partners. Now for party political advantage, there are many of us in opposition parties who would like Lorna Slater to remain as a minister. She graphically undermines the case for this administration more than almost anyone else.

But since most of us put nation before party, there is no case for keeping her as a government minister. And that is where sacking her is a test for Mr Yousaf in front of his party and the nation. The SNP always defends their own, but I doubt any SNP minister would have avoided the chop if they had made a similar number of appalling mistakes in policy and presentation as the theatrical Ms Slater.

Setting up a deposit return scheme should really not test the intellectual abilities of our policymakers to the limits. This is not comparable to the challenges Nye Bevan faced when he sought to design the NHS, or that Margaret Thatcher overcame when she privatised our public utilities. It’s not Rab Butler’s Education Act.

It is a bottle return scheme. Something which in years gone by was known, certainly in the west coast of this country, as taking your ginger bottles back to the chippy. Yet it has been beyond Ms Slater’s capabilities. She assured us that it was both world-leading and globe-saving, yet she has been unable to fulfil the project. With no entrepreneurial experience, she has hired apparent entrepreneurs to assume the risk, but now it looks like the taxpayer will pay for their failures.

The cost to business has already been substantial. The dangers to Scottish business without a UK-wide agreement are grave. Yet unable to get a grip of the detail or practicalities of her policy, Ms Slater instead reaches for the straw man of Westminster claiming that is what stymied her, and not her own inabilities.

Scottish Green Party co-leader Lorna Slater should be sacked as a government minister in the national interest (Picture: Jane Barlow/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Her criticism of the UK Government might pass the first base of plausibility if anything she had done in her 13 months as a government minister had suggested she could be trusted to cross the road on her own. If she had established the credibility that if the nation needed her to go to the bakers, she might actually come back with the rolls.

But sadly not. We know she has copper-bottomed hypocrisy. The Green politician who advocates public transport but likes her own chauffeur a little too much. The woman who even when offered that rarity in modern Scotland – a public ferry service that works – chooses to hire a private boat at the taxpayer’s expense instead.

Ms Slater is patently a disaster as a minister. The question then for Mr Yousaf is what is it about her that he thinks adds value to his government? I can assure him it evades me and, I believe, evades an increasing number of his backbenchers.

If he, as First Minister of Scotland, feels he cannot sack her for fear of Patrick Harvie’s reaction, one can only wonder if he has nightmares about killer wombles. Does he fear it might fracture forever the pointless coalition he inherited from Nicola Sturgeon with what SNP veteran Fergus Ewing described as “wine bar radicals”?

The supposed point of this ‘coalition’ in which the Greens have disproportionate influence compared to SNP MSPs to advocate for implausible schemes, is the fantasy that it secures a majority in the Scottish Parliament for a second independence referendum.

But everyone knows that is not going to happen. The people of Scotland don’t want it. Many independence supporters don’t want it. Many SNP voters don’t want it.

So why does Humza Yousaf allow the humiliation of his own administration at the hands of the Greens – something he doesn’t really need any help with – to continue? The First Minister won his position as leader of the SNP not by asserting himself as his own person but by emphasising he was Ms Sturgeon’s choice. That hasn’t really served him well so far, and in the months ahead we will learn what kind of selling point that is for him long term.

But does he really need to be Mr Harvie’s guy? Is part of his persona and strategy to be Ms Slater’s apologist? How much longer will his own SNP backbenchers wear any of this?

Personally, for political advantage, I hope he makes the case that Ms Slater is vital to the cause of secession because that makes me even surer that the Union is secure. A Scottish Conservatives’ motion of no confidence in her was defeated when SNP MSPs were whipped in to support her, much to their annoyance. Political history does tell us, however, that surviving such a vote is often the precursor to the long, slow demise of a political career.

The Scottish Conservatives are proposing a vote of no confidence in her and it will be interesting to see if SNP MSPs have the backbone to vote the way they feel.

Mr Yousaf has a test. Does he justify retaining Ms Slater in his administration to his SNP backbenchers and the nation? Or will he admit that, like a £100,000 motorhome, she is merely an expensive, unnecessary indulgence he inherited from his predecessor?

Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife

Scottish Green co-leader Lorna Slater's presence in Scottish Government is a gift for the opposition and unionists – Murdo Fraser

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