A year ago this weekend Scotland was in political meltdown. Voters had thrown out the Labour party, ending its 50-year grip on power, and put in the Nationalists but with nothing like a convincing majority. Alex Salmond had won but by just one seat and the election itself was a discredited debacle, not quite Zimbabwe but, with spoilt ballot papers and nearly 200,000 lost votes, hardly the model of a modern democracy.

Then came all that talk of a new consensus and speculation over which of the opposition parties would enter into a coalition with the SNP. When none did, Salmond's future as first minister suddenly seemed fragile. How would he ever be able to govern?

Now look at him. He has enjoyed one of the longest political honeymoons in history and has a 70-point lead over his nearest rival in the popularity stakes, and twice the approval rating of Gordon Brown.

He is liked and trusted by the public, bolstered by an opposition that doesn't have a clue how to defeat him, and buoyed by the apparently universal loyalty of his own troops. “Minority government,” he said last week, “has proven to have advantages”.

If there were to be another Scottish election tomorrow, the SNP would win 51 seats, four more than last year, according to the latest poll, by YouGov. If there were to be a general election they would win a nine-point swing - not quite enough to “make Westminster dance to a Scottish jig” but a very good showing nonetheless.

No wonder when I chanced upon Salmond walking - yes, walking - down an Edinburgh street the other day he looked like a man who already has everything he wants. His first year has been, for him, a triumph and the only thing surprising about this is that anyone is surprised.

He has been preparing for this role for years, sharpening his claws in the Westminster arena and staging his full-time comeback to Scottish politics when he and his party were ready to pounce.

He has collected around him a team of high calibre colleagues, with far more impressive credentials than their Labour predecessors, most of whom never ventured beyond local politics or union officialdom into the real world. He has pursued the populist agenda he said he would, delivering such headline-grabbing goodies to the Scottish electorate as abolishing the graduate endowment, halting hospital closures, phasing out prescription charges, freezing council tax and removing bridge tolls.

These measures were designed to give Scotland a perceived edge over England, to demonstrate how an SNP executive stands up for Scots, and to provoke tensions in the Union by making the English resentful.

On all counts, they have achieved their purpose. Although many of the most vaunted Scottish benefits, such as free care for the elderly, are a shambles in practice, the perception in England is that life is easier north of the border and that this is unfair.

Salmond made no secret of the fact that he would exploit our differences His first 100 days manifesto - It's Time to Move Forward, a policy wish list produced by the SNP during the election campaign - was nothing if not a blueprint for conflict.

Since then, squabbles with Westminster over everything from the Lockerbie bomber to prison funding to a local income tax have been the hallmark of his premiership.

In short, we knew what kind of first minister Alex Salmond would be and it has gone pretty much to plan - his plan.

The one, fairly glaring, exception to this success story is the promotion of independence.The Nationalists believed that, through competent governance, they could coax a dubious electorate to go all the way with them. The opposite has happened.

According to that YouGov poll, support for independence drops to 19% when voters are given a choice between the status quo, more powers for the parliament or a separate state. Only one in five share Salmond's ultimate dream. By demonstrating how effectively his party can operate within the existing framework, he has weakened the case for separatism. Scots can have the best of both worlds: a patriotic leader prepared to fight their corner and the comfort blanket of the British state.

Salmond cannot accept this, but when he wants the Union to work it does, as was demonstrated by cross-border co-operation over the Grangemouth dispute last week, and over the Glasgow terror alert and foot and mouth scare last year.

That doesn't mean he won't continue to pick fights, but should we mind? Even the diehard unionists among us can find something to cheer in the mostly brisk and business-like politicians who are in devolution's driving seat.

Gone is the McConnell cringe factor and the dreary automatons of Labour, who pop-up in opposition from time to time, or in Westminster, but who no longer set the political tone.

What could change? If Brown loses the next election, to be held no later than 2010, Scotland will be under-represented in government. The Tories are unlikely to make big gains here, where the David Cameron effect has been negligible, and Salmond will not miss the opportunity to blame all subsequent grievances on our isolation from London.

Depending on how Cameron handles him, this could fuel separatist sympathies and raise Salmond's hopes of winning an independence referendum, if Holyrood allowed him to have one. On the other hand, if he doesn't make progress on independence, the mood of those biddable fundamentalists on the backbenches might begin to darken. If he reshuffles his ministerial team, which all first ministers have to do sooner or later, he may create among the ousted a dangerous focus for disgruntlement and dissent.

There is also the possibility, by no means remote, that we the voters will grow tired of his smarm offensive and judge him on the delivery of his policies, not on his punchlines. If, in the next three years of this administration, he puts his constitutional interests before Scotland's - whatever he insists, they are not the same - and fails to keep his promises on improving public services, swagger alone will not save him. “The country has changed forever”, a victorious Salmond gloated on May 4 last year, but whether it has changed for the better remains to be seen.