If there is an iron rule in politics, it is this: no matter how long it may have gone on, a honeymoon between a ruling party and the voters has to end sometime. It happened to Blair, it happened to Brown and it happened to Bush. And it will undoubtedly happen to Barack Obama or John McCain.

Yesterday - Wednesday, May 27, 2008 - may well go down as the day the canoodling between the SNP and the electorate stopped. It wasn't quite Black Wednesday and, granted, the wheels did not quite come off the Nationalist wagon, but by the end of the day the SNP was looking distinctly shoogly. It was, perhaps, a Wobbly Wednesday.

For more than a year, this SNP administration has