The Sunday Herald ran an extraordinary article on page 2 yesterday, and by the time we’d finished being startled by what nonsense it was, it set us wondering about why.

The piece triggered a demented, vitriolic outburst on social media from the founder of a semi-well-known Scottish website, furiously and bizarrely demanding apologies from a number of pro-independence sites which had – entirely correctly – warned that the SNP ran the real risk of losing its Holyrood majority at last year’s election, despite the Herald’s and the blogger’s repeated insistence that it definitely wouldn’t.

The newspaper had run a controversial story making the assertion last April, falsely claiming that the ubiquitous psephologist and academic Professor John Curtice had advised Yes supporters to give their list votes to smaller pro-independence parties at the following month’s election rather than the SNP.

But the piece had been rather light on any actual quotes to that effect – not to mention somewhat out of character for the Prof’s careful political neutrality – and when we asked the respected analyst if the Herald’s report had accurately represented his views, he suggested they’d been somewhat exaggerated.

So we were a bit surprised to see the paper repeat the trick yesterday.

“Indy supporters who voted Green did not help Unionists or harm SNP, says academic TACTICAL voting for the Greens by SNP supporters in 2016 increased the number of pro-independence MSPs rather than boosting Unionist numbers at Holyrood, the first major report on last year’s election has found.”

Did it? That might come as a surprise to keen followers of arithmetic, who may have noted that the number of pro-independence MSPs actually FELL in 2016 – from 72 to 69 – rather than increasing, despite pro-independence parties getting a fractionally higher share of the vote (up from 49% in 2011 to 49.4% in 2016).

The Herald’s piece goes on to make another claim about the views of Professor Curtice which don’t seem to be supported – indeed, appear to be contradicted – by his actual words.

“Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said that if there had not been such tactical voting there would have been fewer pro-independence MSPs.”

Did he say that? Let’s look for the quote:

“Curtice said: “It is evident that the apparent tactical switching in favour of the Greens had less impact on the SNP’s overall tally than the party’s failure to win seven constituency seats that it might have been expected to have won.””

That very much appears to be Professor Curtice saying that tactical switching to the Greens DID in fact damage the SNP (he goes on to suggest that it cost the Nats two seats, and with them their majority), but not as much as failing to take some target constituency seats. As with in 2016, the professor has said something that’s perfectly true, but has been distorted into a false headline and then misrepresented in the text.

The report was conducted for the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, most of whose senior executives are on public record as wanting the SNP to be either deprived of its majority or completely destroyed, and whose motivation in producing such studies is therefore fairly clear and open.

But no amount of spin can dodge those inconvenient bare numbers – in 2016 the list vote share for pro-independence parties increased, but was more split than in 2011 – just as the Sunday Herald and others had demanded – yet the number of pro-indy MSPs went down.

So far so fishy, then. But at the start of this article we said we’d wondered why the Sunday Herald would poke a stick in this particular hornet’s nest again after the angry reaction it provoked last time (since when its circulation has taken a 25% dive), and we’ve only come up with one possible explanation – it’s expecting another election.

For the last week or two the news-starved Scottish press has featured quite a bit of low-level muttering about the imminent budget vote. The SNP needs at least one of the opposition parties to either back the budget or abstain on it to get it through, and so far all four are sabre-rattling from positions that are difficult to back down from.

The Tories want the Nats to abandon plans to implement changes to the income-tax threshold that would see higher earners pay slightly more tax than their counterparts in England and Wales. Labour and the Greens, conversely, say they’ll vote against the budget if it doesn’t increase taxes more in order to pay for public services.

The Lib Dems, meanwhile, appear in today’s Times to threaten that they’re prepared to bring the government down if it doesn’t accede to their demands for an extra £500m in spending, although they don’t specify where the money should come from.

Now, for what it’s worth, this site’s view is that one of the opposition parties will blink before the Scottish Government does. The Tories would almost certainly be happy to fight another election and so would the SNP, while the Lib Dems probably fancy their chances of a slight bounce from their Brexit stance.

Labour and the Greens, however, have far more to lose. Labour would be fighting from a position of having lost a third of its support since last May, and the Greens might find SNP supporters considerably less inclined to lend them a second vote this time round. Neither Kezia Dugdale nor Patrick Harvie and that other one nobody can ever remember have much prospect of worthwhile gains, and both could find themselves rather shorter on MSPs after a snap election – voters tend not to reward parties who bring down governments.

(The Greens, of course, are already in the best position they can ever hope to achieve from an election – being able to take the governing party from a minority to a majority. Even in the unlikely event of winning a few extra seats they’d be materially no better off, and the very real chance of losing that “kingmaker” status would be a high risk for no meaningful potential reward.)

But with the semi-exception of the Lib Dems, the opposition are digging themselves in pretty deep. While nobody would be in the least bit surprised to see Labour ultimately abstain on something again, it’s at least possible that the budget deadlock of 2009 – which was swiftly resolved when they, the Tories and the Lib Dems backed down in return for minor face-saving concessions – could go a step further and send Scots to the polling stations for the eighth time in six years.

In that event, the “tactical voting” campaign of the far left will want to have its troops ready to go again. And since this time it’s going to be a lot harder to sell the idea that a split vote is safe because the SNP will get a majority anyway, it makes sense that they’d want to get a head start.