When it comes to political spin machines, the Scottish National Party's media operation is something of a Rolls-Royce, at least in Holyrood terms.

Yet again yesterday the party showed its ability to make a virtue out of clutching at straws by portraying the annual report of expenditure and revenue for Scotland as a vindication of what

it has been saying for years about the financial case for independence - even though the document showed a £10.2 billion Scottish deficit in 2006/07.

That vindication was based on North Sea oil revenues flowing into Scottish coffers. The man in the street may wonder why politicians can count something that they don't have as being on the credit side when, if he did the same, his bank manager would quickly put him right about life's little financial realities.

It is little wonder that Nationalist ministers are attempting to talk themselves and their cause up. They have had a torrid time of it since the day seven weeks ago - christened Wobbly Wednesday by this newspaper - when they come unstuck on different matters three times in the same day.

Indeed, little has gone right since then and the Nationalists have been on the back foot on a number of issues - concessionary bus fares, hospital superbugs, arts funding and local income tax among them this week alone.

Their recent statement on how they mean to combat Scotland's debilitating love affair with alcohol also mostly drew a mixture of derision and abuse - unfairly, this writer thought, because although it lurched from one “shock” tactic to the next, the strategy's critics sang dumb on just how they would cure this particular Scottish sickness.

It is, though, no exaggeration to say that the Nationalists are, privately, looking forward to the start of the long summer recess at Holyrood next week with more than usual enthusiasm. It cannot come too quickly for some ministers who have been under constant bombardment in recent days as they, inevitably, find that being in government is, after all, no soft touch.

It is not quite a case of “never glad confident morning again” but it is true that the much-touted SNP honeymoon - when it seemed that ministers could do no wrong - had us all a bit too transfixed. Politics has a way of reminding even the most self-confident minister that he or she is mortal after all.

The SNP does not exist solely for the purpose of proving that it can “do” government. Its real purpose is separation from the UK and Alex Salmond also has the problem over the summer of coming up with some scheme that will get him his beloved independence referendum in 2011.

Now that Scottish Labour has decided, after much to-ing and fro-ing, that, come what may, it will find a way of voting against any such plebiscite, Mr Salmond has not a snowball's chance of winning the vote in the Scottish Parliament whenever it comes.

While he might worry about that, however, Mr Salmond knows that he and his party are under no great threat at Holyrood. Indeed, he can also while away the summer months dreaming up ways of presenting the advent of a Conservative government at Westminster as ushering in a new “democratic deficit” in Scotland because it will not have voted for David Cameron - although how Scotland can have a democratic deficit when it now has its own Parliament is a moot point. Still, it's a handy slogan when you've run out of real arguments.

There were many who wondered a year ago how long Mr Salmond's minority administration at Holyrood would survive. The answer appears to be at least four years, because no Opposition leader has found an answer to his brand of political showmanship and opportunism. That, perhaps, is the real Scottish democratic deficit ... someone who can really take on Salmond.

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