Nicola Sturgeon can’t admit just how much she needs Rishi Sunak

When they met for an hour in an Inverness hotel last night, there was one thing that Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon agreed on (although neither could mention it, and Sturgeon couldn’t admit it): that it is in the interest of both of them to see Sunak stay on as prime minister after the next election.

That a Labour government of the UK would be a disaster for the Scottish National Party is one of the great unsayables of Scottish politics. Once, when Sturgeon appeared to have said it, there was such a hullabaloo that some of us have only recently got over it. It was reported in 2015 that she had told the French ambassador that she wanted David Cameron to continue as prime minister at that election.

She furiously denied it; the SNP accused the UK government of dirty tricks, as the source for the story appeared to be a note of the conversation made by a UK official at the embassy in Paris.