Humza Yousaf's alternative leaving speech as imagined by Kevin McKenna

Last week I stood here to end that Bute House nonsense that my predecessor had left me. I made that decision because I believed it was right for the party I lead and for the country. And, seeing as I might as well now be honest about this, here’s why.

I had no problem with the Greens’ ginger bottle return scheme and their fancy boilers and turning off the North Sea gas. Let’s face it: we all knew none of it would work and I was planning to ditch them before the next Scottish election anyway. But when Harvie popped in the other week with a proposed white paper on energy efficiency I knew that the party was over.

The now unhappy couple of Scottish politics (Image: free)

The wee man was proposing a 50-year curfew of no electricity between dusk and dawn. “What’s a mere 50 years when the earth had been around for four and a half billion,” he’d said. “And the alien spaceships have been around for a lot longer than that,” Lorna had added.

I’d have accepted a much more reasonable ten-year moratorium: any reasonable person would. They’d told me they were working on a secret prototype – endorsed by NASA – of personalised jet packs powered by recycled chip fat oil which would meet all our personal transport needs. He produced some detailed line drawings that Ross Greer had done in his 5th year art classes in Bearsden and it seemed there was no reason not to believe him.

“They’ve been doing it in the schemes for years,” Ross had said. “I’d been told all about it during our community exchange programme when we got to swap places with pupils from rough areas like Bishopbriggs.”

But then I thought: haud on a minute: we’d need to alert the RAF and the local air traffic control. And besides; Stewart McDonald would be getting pelters from his mates at NATO if the citizenry started jouking about all over the place in jet-packs. It was a great idea in principle but the Greens hadn’t thought it all through.

But it was the idea to rewild the motorways and reintroduce wolves, bears and giraffes to Scotland’s wild spaces that made me think that perhaps the Bute House game was a bogey. “There could even be woolly mammoths,” said Lorna. “We’ve recently reintroduced them to the Canadian Rockies.”

Look, I’ve no problem with the big beasties returning to our wee bit hills and glens. But this needs to be done sustainably and in agreement with our partners in the Scottish landowning sector who work so hard to make half of Scotland attractive to rich overseas gun enthusiasts.

When I suggested that we perhaps modify these ideas and get our partners at Ernst & Happel to produce an analysis, the Greens became revolting and threatened to bring down the Bute House Agreement. All I did was get my retaliation in first. Ash Regan had written to me saying that she’d back me if I agreed to her demands about “Independence for Scotland, protecting the dignity, safety and rights of women and children, and providing a competent government for our people and businesses across Scotland”.

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Humza Yousaf could have survived but he shot himself in the foot

Humza Yousaf throws the baton down and runs for the hills

So, while a route through this week's vote of no confidence was possible, I am not willing to trade my values and principles or do deals with WHOMEVER simply for retaining power. Nice try, Ms Regan.

And yes, I know I said I wanted to make Scotland a Tory-free zone the other week, but I’d really hoped that Douglas Ross wouldn’t have taken it so personally. That’s why I was willing to put all that aside and reach out to Douglas and his team who, as everyone knows, are a great bunch of lads. Politics can be a brutal business. I know that now.

Let me say to my SNP family: I will always be with you. I will always campaign alongside you. We have had setbacks but we have overcome them.

That said, Nicola had once advised me to avoid the smart-arses and promote the nodding donkeys. “They’re a lot less trouble,” she’d said. For a while, that worked. Now, I’m not mentioning any names here, but when one of my cabinet colleagues suggested condensing the five-year medical degree course into a bijou one-year affair to relieve staffing pressures in the NHS I began to have my doubts. “After all, you can get most of it off the internet,” he’d told me.

Another of my colleagues had wanted to ease the affordable housing crisis by upgrading Nicola’s baby box initiative to an adult box. “If the baby box can be turned into a wee bed,” she’d said, “then there's no reason why an adult box can't be turned into a neat one-bedroom cardboard flat.”

I can also assure everyone in the SNP that our party’s finances are in a better place than when I became leader a year ago. Our Eastern European business partners, Kuznetsov & Belanov have reassured us that our investment portfolio in underground car parks and waste disposal units in Lithuania and Estonia remains rock solid.

Ash Regan (Image: free)

And meanwhile our Irish turf advisers, whom we’ve been working with for 25 years, report steady returns on our investments in the Donegal stud farm sector with the Brady & O’Leary racing syndicate.

Politics and politicians - not unreasonably, I'm afraid - have often been maligned, however I believe that when we get it right - and often we do - we are a force for good that can transform people's lives for the better. To my colleagues in opposition, regardless of political party, I genuinely do wish you well. I bear no ill-will and certainly no grudge against anyone.

And please don’t worry about me. I’ll probably do a spell on the back benches and I’ve already had calls over the weekend from a certain world-class strategic communications and public affairs agency where I think I can still influence the national conversation in uplifting and kind ways by utilising all my global contacts.

Meanwhile, there is a professorship opportunity – created just for me - in the John Smith Centre at Glasgow University. They’ve created a new ‘Shortcuts to Leadership' faculty and Kezia says it’s just the ticket.