SENIOR SNP types are meeting over the coming days to head off the potential for some unintended consequences of future political successes.

Seizing control of Scotland’s town halls in next year’s council elections might well be the easy bit. What’s taxing the party’s new ministerial team is the calibre of some current SNP opposition groups who would struggle to “run a menage” let alone balance budgets counted in billions.

Short on experience, talent, nous and discipline, and taking their first steps in running cherished services from schools to care in an era of austerity, there is a very real fear that not only could the party’s reputation for competence and national priorities – such as educational attainment – be critically damaged but so too the ultimate goal, independence.

The SNP dodged a bullet in the 2012 council elections when many predicted a repeat of the previous year’s landslide victory at Holyrood.

Renfrewshire Council, then under the control of now finance secretary Derek Mackay, was a model SNP council. Remove him from the equation and councillors there infamously took to burning copies of the Smith Commission report outside their HQ.

In North Lanarkshire the party is dysfunctional, with power cliques more interested in tearing lumps out of each other than the open goals presented by a Labour regime whose cadaveric spasms throw up all sorts of bad odours.

Across the Clyde in South Lanarkshire the SNP barely bother “opposing” the Labour-led administration.

Similarly, Inverclyde is up for grabs. Remove the energetic young leader Chris McEleny from the picture and pickings are slim and grim.

Across the Firth in West Dunbartonshire, from the pretty low base of “Scotland’s worst council” when it took over from Labour in 2007, the SNP not only split but did little to reverse the authority’s shoddy reputation. They were dumped in 2012.

Glasgow is, of course, the big prize. Unlike its neighbours it has been a relatively sensible and effective opposition, its leader Susan Aitken brings discipline to her group which even rivals recognise is making itself “administration-ready”. The credentials of recent by-election winners are a step up from many of the 2012 intake.

There will be tense times for sitting SNP councillors in the weeks ahead. The hints are there’s a new willingness to sift out the dross. There will be de-selections and leaders replaced.

Newbies won’t just the referendum generation. For professional types with political ambitions, running a council is a much more attractive proposition than £16,000-a-year on opposition backbenches. Meanwhile, the resignation of Alex Neil, Lanarkshire’s lynchpin, as a minister is seen as a first step in detoxifying the area.

Beyond the Scottish Government governing, shaping these opposition groups into credible, effective and attractive propositions is said to be the SNP’s biggest priority. It darn well should be.