TO deal or not to deal, that was the question at FMQs.

Tory leader Ruth Davidson believed it was definitely time for the First Minister to take a trip down the happy valleys and copy the Welsh government in accepting the umpteenth rewrite of the EU Withdrawal Bill.

Or could it be, she wondered, that Nicola Sturgeon had an ulterior motive for not embracing Westminster’s offer on post-Brexit powers. Something beginning with ‘I’ perhaps.

“Will the FM for once do a deal in the national interest and not in her nationalist interest?”

The FM, a lover of all things Welsh until the Welsh stopped being useful, was unmoved.

She had no intention of copying Cardiff Bay and backing a wretched plan that would let Westminster hog devolved powers for years and impose its mad schemes on Scotland.

We’d all be force-fed delicious chlorine-flavoured chicken beaks from Iowa in no time.

No self-respecting MSP, she said oxymoronically, could put up with such savoury lunacy.

“If that means we are the only party that is prepared to stand up for the rights of this Scottish Parliament, so be it,” she said with a Churchillian hard stare.

“This deal is not in the national interest.”

Labour’s Richard Leonard asked whether Shona Robison was in the national interest.

Highlighting the dire treatment of a woman with terminal cancer, he said the Health Secretary ought to be sacked to help draw a line under NHS failures.

LibDem Willie Rennie and Labour MSP Neil Findlay made the same polite suggestion.

Three times the FM was urged to bin Shona the Jonah, and three times she forgot to sing her praises, saying only that she was “taking a range of actions”.

Cabinet surgery seems nigh.

Robot prefect Ash Denham then asked an appalling plant.

Had the EU Withdrawal Bill been “adequately amended”, wondered the Edinburgh Nat.

“If I understand it correctly…” she began, launching into a tortured, HQ-approved script.

“Surely no party that has any respect for the Scottish Parliament or devolution could sign up to that?” she recited.

Giving her the benefit of a Turing test, Ms Sturgeon said she was quite right, only to be interrupted by mass groans.

It seems that if there’s one thing worse than chlorinated chicken, it’s free range toady.