Was there ever a period in Scotland’s recent political history when the stars portending a vote for independence were all favourably aligned? Perhaps at some point in the late 1990s with oil revenues buoyant and the contents of the McCrone Report divulged and not concealed, the ideal conditions for a Yes vote would have been present. But, well… we didn’t have Holyrood then and it would be another few years before Tony Blair’s Camelot would be exposed as the whited sepulchre it turned out to be. In the meantime Mr Blair’s writ ran to all corners of the United Kingdom and it would be another six years or so before Scots were permitted to know its oil revenues could have made it the “Kuwait of the Western world”.

The SNP’s majority at Holyrood in 2011 and the winnowing of Labour support in its urban heartlands suggested late 2014 would be as good a time as any for the constitutional question to be put. After all, the engineering design underpinning Holyrood polls was there to ensure no party could ever gain a majority in a Scottish election. If the SNP could prevail in the face of this then surely it would be set fair to do so in a straight Yes/No run-off for independence? And besides, achieving an overall majority against the grain was difficult enough; doing so once more would always be a degree or two more so.

Almost three years have elapsed since the first referendum on Scottish independence and only lately has it been acknowledged how ill-prepared was the SNP and the wider Yes movement for a long and arduous campaign. That they achieved 45 per cent was immediately considered impressive; in reality it was a minor miracle.

They had gone into the campaign on 28 per cent and with an economic case that had a glass jaw more fragile than Richard Dunn. The first six months of the campaign was lost amidst in-fighting and an absence of discipline. A day before the vote no-one knew what the SNP’s plans for a currency looked like and there was widespread incoherence on the scale of the fiscal deficit. The White Paper on Independence began to turn to dust in your hands before you were halfway through. It was grandiloquent in nature and size and seemed to be promising a land of milk and honey, sustained by oil and the easy-going bonhomie of the nicest people on the planet.

In her clearest indication yet that a second referendum will happen soon Nicola Sturgeon said on Thursday the autumn of 2018 was the most sensible option for this to take place. Give or take a year she is correct in her analysis as it couldn’t occur any time after late 2019. The UK election is slated for 2020 and the Holyrood election the following year. Even if you strip away the Scottish Tories’ false optimism and Scottish Labour’s continuing apocalypse there is still not even a remote guarantee an overall Yes majority could be mustered in the Scottish Parliament.

Some of the main weaknesses in the Nationalist offering are still present. The price of oil has plummeted once more (though any long-term predictions in this febrile field are worthless). The GERS figures (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) in recent years have all indicated an independent Scotland would immediately be saddled with a serious budget deficit.

Yet, if the autumn of next year is to be the date of a second independence referendum, Ms Sturgeon will go into it with several advantages denied to her predecessor Alex Salmond. The biggest one, certainly, is Brexit but also a Brexit that has grown shrill and contemptuous of all reasonable attempts to soften its impact. Ms Sturgeon’s opponents have accused the First Minister of political opportunism in manipulating Brexit to bring about a second independence vote. She was never serious, it’s alleged, in hinting at taking independence off the table in return for allowing a Scotland which voted to Remain access to the single market. Such artifice can never be proved but what has been evident is the high-handed manner in which Theresa May’s government dismissed that aspiration.

The two defeats the government have suffered in the Lords over Parliament’s scrutiny of the terms of Brexit will, of course, be overturned, but in doing so Mrs May will not easily sidestep the growing feeling her own performance and leadership throughout this process has been that of a medieval baron. In particular her continued refusal to guarantee the futures of EU migrants currently living and working in the UK is being regarded as unnecessarily reactionary and belligerent at a time when she must surely know calm heads and reasonable language must prevail if her "best deal for Britain" is to be achieved. Mrs May’s leadership and conduct has been deeply questionable throughout this process and pictures of her snorting disdainfully before Wednesday’s Budget conveyed something slightly nauseating.

On the day Ms Sturgeon divulged her preferred date for a second referendum, a telephone poll by Ipsos Mori had Yes and No running at 50/50. Part of the polling narrative during the first independence referendum was that telephone polls consistently produced the worst numbers for the Yes campaign. Indeed, several Better Together campaigners first time around told me they were more confident in the final weeks of the campaign against the prevailing picture because of what their telephone polling was telling them.

During my interview with Professor Sir Tom Devine for this paper last week the historian pointed out Mrs May will go into a second referendum fighting wars on two other fronts; Brexit negotiations and the simmering issue of a hard border in Ireland. She will be unable and unwilling to commit the same resources to the battle in Scotland as she would otherwise prefer to have done. Meanwhile, the Labour Party in Scotland will be careful not to repeat its gross errors of judgment during the first independence campaign.

Yet, while the SNP might be in a stronger position this time around it ought to be giving serious consideration to a more teething issue: the extent to which the party could be its own worst enemy before and during a second independence campaign. Many of us who were persuaded to vote Yes in 2014 did so in the expectation independence would allow us to de-couple from a Westminster polity in the grip of a hard-Right junta more influenced by the ideas of Ukip than by consensual social democracy. Nothing that has unfolded south of the Border has changed in this respect. But little has been done either by the SNP government to justify its honeyed narrative during the first referendum on social justice, fairness and bridging the equality gap.

You still have much work to do, Ms Sturgeon, in delivering on even some of these promises if you want some of us to say Yes again.