Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson resigned today, having suffered a torrid week of criticism over his handling of the snow storms on Monday.
First he was adamant he was in control, then he was full of apologies. Then Alex Salmond was leaping to his defence, then happy to accept his resignation.
It was obviously curtains for the feckless minister once Wee Eck and John Swinney started to fill in at interviews for him. The men in grey kilts kept him off the TV screens so that he could do no more political damage, and he was then sidelined by the Resilience Committee on which he should have been playing a central part.
No wonder the poor man resigned. Bad enough being made to look a fool by Annabel Goldie in Parliament, another thing completely when your own side turn against you.
He did the decent thing in the end.
Mr Stevenson was famously Alex Salmond's taxi driver, and reputedly one of his few close friends over 30 years. Wee Eck got him to stand for a parliamentary seat at short notice because he had no-one else, and he moved on from there.
This resignation will hit home hard at the very heart of the SNP, with Wee Eck losing one of the very few MSPs he can truly count on in his inner circle.
The real problem might be to come....finding a replacement when there are very few, if any, backbench SNP MSPs to choose from.
That said, the unlucky minister did'nt set too high a standard to live up to, and his replacement will only now have a few months before they are back in opposition again anyway.
There wil be much analysis done of this incident, but it is hardly worth the bother really. We have humoured the SNP for long enough now, time to look forward to what we can do in 2011 and beyond and let this hopeless shower become a distant memory.
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