An MSP recounts how he was eating in the restaurant of the Scottish Parliament recently when Alex Salmond came in. Upon sitting down, the First Minister regally held out his hands. An accompanying flunkey whipped out some sanitiser and reverently smeared it on to the sacred mitts of power.

A small thing, perhaps, but small things can contain big truths. The man who no longer believes he should have to apply his own soap is the same man who swaggered into last Tuesday’s debate with Alistair Darling expecting to walk it and who staggered out two hours later having been roundly thrashed. I don’t think the two events are entirely unconnected. A question: Is King Eck going a bit Louis XIV?

Mr Salmond has put a spring in the step of his opponents at precisely the wrong moment. With five weeks to go, the Better Together campaign, which has not been without its troubles over the past year, is a happy ship. The engines are running smoothly, the captain has the full confidence of his crew and the final destination is coming into view.

Whether the television debates will have any real influence on the referendum outcome remains to be seen but, regardless, Mr Darling’s surprisingly easy win in the first of them, in front of an audience of 1.2 million people, has had an enormous psychological impact on both the Yes and No movements.

It has, for example, created the first clear cracks in SNP/Yes unity. Throughout the campaign the separatists – the magnificently untameable Jim Sillars aside — have maintained a discipline bordering on the creepy. Ironically, their obsession with independence seems to remove their capability for independent thought.

But after his failure last Tuesday, Mr Salmond found himself in the unfamiliar position of being attacked by his own side. He was criticised by senior SNP figures for his weak response when put under pressure over the currency issue and it was suggested he be replaced in the next debate by his tigrish deputy, Nicola Sturgeon. The First Minister was worried enough by this friendly fire to make a rare appearance at his backbenchers’ weekly meeting. Labour leader Johann Lamont cheekily suggested Ms Sturgeon herself was behind the briefings.

What must have stung even more, though, was the reaction of the audience during the debate. Mr Salmond’s inability to give a straight answer on currency saw him booed and heckled by a home crowd. One fearless questioner confronted him in a way I suspect no one has dared to for some time, saying, ‘I am disappointed in you. As a politician of some note, some of your remarks have been snide and not very nice coming from a leader of the Scottish parliament. If this is what we are going to have as an independent Scotland, then obviously we are in for trouble.’

What I thought most telling about these moments was that the First Minister clearly did not know what to do with his face. He has been trained to display a patient ‘I’m listening’ smile rather than a contemptuous smirk when dealing with political opponents, but this was something new: Scottish punters showing him no deference or respect; even mocking him. He was visibly rocked, and ran through his whole palette of practised expressions before realising he didn’t have one for this kind of situation. Even after recovering himself, his eyes burned with anger.

I saw it again the next morning when a television reporter shoved the day’s front pages under his nose, containing headlines such as ‘Alex takes a pounding’ and ‘A bloody nose for Salmond’. He was transparently outraged by her temerity.

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A few days before the debate, a friend in the Better Together team asked how I expected Mr Salmond to play it. I said I thought he’d go for a mix of the statesmanlike — as if speaking for the entire Scottish nation – and the kind of aggressive positivity that has fired the Yes campaign throughout. Mr Darling’s job was to tease out the chippiness and bad temper that often seethes just under the surface, and to expose the First Minister’s sometimes shaky grasp of detail.

I was wrong. In the end, bafflingly, Mr Salmond did the job himself. A poll published by the Daily Mail at the weekend showed just how effective his self-sabotage was: the buzzwords voters associated with his performance were ‘weak’, ‘uninformed’ and ‘dishonest’; more than two-thirds demanded a ‘Plan B’ on the currency issue; and support for a No vote had increased by four points to 50 per cent, with Yes dropping to 37 per cent. A poll in today’s Sun puts the gap at 55–35. Friends watching in England, told for many years that the SNP leader is the most formidable politician in Britain, have been left scratching their heads. Quite an evening’s work, that.

The reasonably basic question SNP strategists need to answer before the second debate later this month is: what the hell is wrong with our guy? I’m told that during their practice sessions for the debate Mr Darling was played brilliantly by the lawyer and former MSP Duncan Hamilton. The Labour man’s every tactic and question were anticipated, ‘almost as if Duncan had the No campaign script’.

But against this there were too many advisors offering too many clashing opinions. There was too much over-confidence, a willingness to believe the advance hype that victory was inevitable. And then there was the biggest block of all: Mr Salmond’s refusal to listen to advice. This takes us to the heart of a messy problem that may be unfixable.

A few years ago the former foreign secretary and neurologist Lord Owen put forward a theory of a psychological condition that affects those at the pinnacle of power, which he called the ‘Hubris Syndrome’.

Lord Owen explained how the idea of hubris developed through ancient Greek drama: ‘The hero wins glory and acclamation by achieving unwonted success against the odds. The experience then goes to the head: they begin to treat others, mere ordinary mortals, with contempt and disdain and develop such confidence in their own ability that they begin to think themselves capable of anything.

‘This excessive self-confidence leads them into misinterpreting the reality around them and into making mistakes. Eventually they get their come-uppance and meet their nemesis, which destroys them… The moral is that we should beware of allowing power and success to go to our heads, making us too big for our boots.’

There were, he said, 14 potential symptoms that might trigger a diagnosis of Hubris Syndrome. ‘These symptoms typically grow in strength the longer a… leader remains in post.’ I’ll list a few:

· a narcissistic propensity to see the world in which the leader operates primarily as an arena in which to exercise power and seek glory;

· a predisposition to take actions which seem likely to cast the individual in a good light – i.e. in order to enhance their image;

· a messianic manner of talking about current activities and a tendency to exaltation;

· an identification with the nation or organisation which the individual leads to the extent that he or she regards his or her outlook and interests as identical with it;

· excessive confidence in his or her own judgement and contempt for the advice or criticism of others;

· an exaggerated self-belief, bordering on a sense of omnipotence, in what personally he or she can achieve;

· ‘Hubristic incompetence’: not the ordinary incompetence where things go wrong because a faulty judgement or a miscalculation has been made, but where the incompetence is due to too much self-confidence that has led the leader not to worry about the nuts and bolts of a decision.

Lord Owen diagnosed David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher in her later years as HS sufferers. He believed that Winston Churchill, John Major and Jim Callaghan had remained immune.

What of Mr Salmond? He has been First Minister for seven years, the longest holder of that post. He has been leader of the SNP for 20 of the past 25 years, and has been feted, served and obeyed by legions during that time.

He is, I think, the kind of person who adapts easily to the trappings of power and luxuriates in them. He enjoys wielding authority over others and does not like to be challenged. Since winning the supposedly unattainable overall majority in 2011, he has been able to rule unfettered. Even now, after everything, he is stubbornly doubling down on his tattered currency policy.

I’m starting to suspect that a consequence of this referendum could be the fatal undermining of Mr Salmond’s authority: it could prove to be his Wizard of Oz moment. The sharks in the SNP are circling; Ms Sturgeon’s personal ambitions do not grow less fervid; the voters are groggily coming round to his flaws, having been bewitched for so long by his talents; his political opponents are emboldened.

I know this: if I was in charge of Labour, I’d make sure a big gun is sent back from Westminster to lead the Scottish party into the 2016 devolved election. The fearsome wizard is no different to any great conjuring act: behind the glitter and smoke there’s just a bloke with delusions of grandeur. There is, we must remember, no such thing as magic.

(A version of this article appears in today’s Scottish Daily Mail)