It was ladies’ day in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, and the sisterhood was wearing red.

Not just Johann Lamont, standing in for her leader, but virtually the entire Labour back benches seemed to have opted for stridency in dress and attitude.

It may have been a party decision, arrived at behind closed doors, but it is more likely to have been down to collective unconsciousness, the instinctive adoption of a splash of colour and party outrage to remind us that having mere men in charge week after week is — well, a bit grey.

Speaking of which, Iain Gray was away. So was Alex Salmond — both attending the funeral of Bill Speirs. That left Annabel Goldie, who is a sort of one-person sisterhood, on the Tory benches, Ms Lamont for Labour, and Nicola Sturgeon the SNP deputy leader. They seemed determined to make the most of it.

Ms Lamont can be a bit on the scary side. When she is angry, which seems quite a lot of the time, her mouth sets in an unforgiving line, and her eyes narrow. She is not the kind of person you would want to fall out with on a Glasgow Pollok street corner.

Yesterday she was angry about schools, and the SNP’s failure to build more. The government, she said, had taken two years to produce its school-building programme, and no one was any the wiser. “When will the first of these schools open?” she snapped. “How many children will move into new classrooms at these schools before the next election?”

Ms Sturgeon is not without experience in her front bench role — after all she stood in for the First Minister month after month when he retired to Westminster. But yesterday, her usually fiery responses seemed on the muted side. Perhaps because she was defending the indefensible — a school building programme that has yet to build schools, and a funding body which has yet to fund anything.

As a result the sisterhood began to taunt her — to point, to snigger, and finally to fall about laughing. It was a disconcerting sight, all that red, seething in collective riducule. The Presiding Officer seemed uncomfortable, as he sought to restore order, a bit like a male bouncer trying to control a girls’ night out.

On the whole, he left them to it. Which allowed Ms Lamont to score a palpable point. She asked Ms Sturgeon if she would give the SNP Education Secretary marks out of ten.

Now Mr Salmond would probably have awarded her at least 20, but Ms Sturgeon did not choose to profer a figure at all, occasioning much ooh-ing and aah-ing from the ladies in red. Whether this means that the ground is slipping from beneath the minister’s feet, or whether Ms Sturgeon was simply refusing to rise to the bait, remains to be seen.

It was left to Ms Goldie to restore a modicum of respectability to the proceedings. She is, on these occasions, as rigorous as a matron in charge of an unruly ward. And it was the health of the nation’s children that concerned her. She had heard “the hollow ring of more broken election promises from the SNP”, and now she warned: “You can’t play politics with our children’s future.”

Indeed not. The chamber subsided. Heads were shaken. Even the red seemed to be fading once again. Next week, we realised, it would be back to the dull colours of male normality.

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