THE taxi driver en route to Aberdeen’s mighty Event Centre, north-west of the city, insists it was modelled on The Titanic.

It carries the kenspeckle logo (in these parts anyway) of the Press and Journal. Perhaps this is a touching tribute to the story most commonly associated with the famous north-east newspaper, “Titanic latest: NE man dead” which appeared on a newsagent billboard.

This weekend The Event Complex Aberdeen (TECA) has been hosting the SNP’s annual conference, the first time in three years that the party has held an in-person event. All of the other major UK parties held one of these symposiums last year, not long after pandemic lockdown restrictions ended. Scotland’s governing party chose to delay theirs by an extra year and for reasons that haven’t yet been properly explained.

It’s led to speculation, even amongst activists, that perhaps deep internal wounds caused by the Gender Recognition Bill; defections to Alba and the slow route of travel towards a second independence referendum needed an extra year or so to heal before opposing delegates could stand to be in the same room as each other.

This might also explain the choice of this massive arena in the north-east as the venue for the long-awaited reunion.

After a three-year gap, you might have thought Glasgow would have been the natural choice, if for no other reason than its proximity to the bulk of the population.

But it’s within the Aberdeen branch that Nicola Sturgeon’s most loyal followers – effectively her Praetorian Guard – are to be found, while the west of Scotland is known to harbour those who are amongst the most vociferous of her critics. This is safe territory for her.

There had been speculation that this event might expose the fermenting tensions within the party, but there is little evidence of incivility here. Yet nor is it characterised by the family-get-together vibe of the immediate post-referendum years.

On those occasions – Glasgow, Perth, Inverness and Edinburgh – the ambience was exuberant, exultant even, as it seemed that the SNP were on the brink of delivering independence on the back of ever-increasing winning margins in every Scottish and UK election across all jurisdictions: Holyrood, Westminster, local authority and European.

Perhaps it was the cavernous aspect of this constructed Aberdeen behemoth that rendered the weekend’s excursions and alarums less intense. But nowhere was there any sense that anyone was standing on the cusp of history. Even before the pandemic began to pulse, SNP conferences were succumbing to the chilly embrace of corporatism and commerce.

Once, the main thoroughfares leading to the conference arenas had the crafts and home-baking aspect of a local market. Anyone and everyone was welcome to set up their rudimentary stalls and to rub shoulders with the titans of high finance and the soft leather and Glenmorangie of the lobbying sector.

Now, at 10-grand-a-pop for a conference spot, the trestle tables and badges have been replaced – almost in their entirety – by hubs and pods. And you sensed that something of the old village fete that once lent this movement its unworldly charm had been lost forever.

Yet some old faces remained to offer smiles and a welcome. A little tour of this pop-up boulevard was not unpleasant, even though it seemed that all you’d been doing in the intervening three years was criticising their party and being disobliging of their leaders.

Before I’d taken a few steps, I found myself being impelled gently sideways by a kindly but formidable lady who wasn’t brooking any objections.

She’d been a primary school headteacher and was now involved with Upstart, the organisation advocating for Scotland’s children to have a two-year kindergarten stage before they start school at seven. It’s based on well-founded principles of child development in other European countries.

They’re asking the party to back their motion the next day and these volunteers (their stall was paid for by a single donor) will only admit to a 50-50 chance of success. I gather all my experience of how politics works to lower their expectations: “It all makes sense,” I say, “but ruling parties rarely back ideas leading to radical change. This might have to be a slow-burn.” Conference doesn’t agree with me and duly backs the motion.

Round the corner there’s an old-school table with artisan chocolate products being commandeered by two women. One of them is Sandra Colamartino, a former colleague at Scotland on Sunday and – much more compellingly – one of the members of Scotland’s ground-breaking international women’s rugby team who reached the World Cup quarter-final in 1994 and won the Grand Slam four years later. I was the paper’s sports editor and was firmly imprisoned in a gnarly, west-of-Scotland approach to major sports that had reduced women’s events mainly to the News in Brief margins.

And then Sandra had bustled along to chivvy us out of our narrow perceptions and to tell us that women’s rugby was where the sport’s real superstars resided. In 2024 it will be 30 years since they shook our world and Sandra is seeking to have their achievement recognised in a stage play. I suggest that BBC Scotland ought to be interested in a documentary and hope this won’t be the kiss of death.

I depart with one of her company’s products, a confection with a rather pleasing resemblance of Nicola Sturgeon on the wrapping. “I’m not very political,” says Sandra, “but I thought she did a magnificent job for us during the lockdown and sent her one of these. I hope she got it.” 

Soon, some politicians begin to materialise and you instinctively try to recall if you’ve been unkind about them since we’d last met. And if they still bear grudges. But they’re all professionally civil and there is even be a batsqueak of warmth. Besides, they’ve been in power for a political generation: it’s not as though they’re trembling at what I might think.

There is even a murmur of excitement at reports of a thawing in the chilly relationship between Nicola Sturgeon and Joanna Cherry. The two were seen engaging during a BBC discussion.

Neither Sturgeon nor Cherry seem aware that, after independence, the second most desired outcome among many of the party’s rank and file is to see these two sharing platforms once more.

I attend a fringe meeting on the future of film and television in Scotland, hosted by Angus Robertson as Culture Minister, part of a sprawling portfolio that includes the Constitution (independence, basically) and External Affairs. It has become a little tradition of mine at these events to attend a Robertson workshop. It was while attending one of his meetings a decade ago in Inverness that first persuaded me of the case for Scottish independence.

He remains one of the sharpest minds in the party. And when you hear him speak you immediately reproach yourself for your own slovenly verbal comportment, resolving to speak up straight and re-adjust your glottal stops. I approach him later at the traditional press and media hospitality event, attended by most of the SNP’s elected politicians and he’s courtly  about the criticism I’ve been offering about the glacial approach to securing a second referendum. It’s addressed by Nicola Sturgeon whose witty, off-the-cuff address features bracing anecdotes and observations involving mortified colleagues and hapless political opponents. It elicits a sigh of regret from a young colleague on The National. “She’s on great form. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could quote her?” he says.

The trade-off here is that the First Minister and her colleagues can mix with the scribes in an atmosphere of conviviality, the political equivalent of the football match on no-man’s-land during the Christmas truce of 1914. Here is where the loathing and suspicion can be laid aside for a few hours. And, as the FM points out, a functioning democracy needs the press to be vigilant.

Sturgeon seems relaxed and jovial and the next day will deliver an assured and confident keynote speech which delights the conference. There is little sign that she intends to step down any time soon.

And certainly not when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are making Scottish nationalism fun again.

No-one will venture optimism about the impending Supreme Court judgment on Holyrood’s legal competency to hold a referendum without Westminster approval. But there’s a shared sense, expressed by every delegate I spoke with, that a judicial panel comprising the ermined escutcheons of the British establishment telling a sovereign parliament that it can’t hold a referendum will make the case even more compelling.