In October 2002, news broke that the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation had donated £11,000 to the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency office of Jack McConnell, then Scotland’s First Minister, and that the Labour Party had failed to declare the donation in accordance with election law.

Earlier that year, at age 22, I had begun working for David McLetchie, the Tory party’s leader. This, I thought, was the game. The big time. Only a year previously, Jack’s predecessor Henry McLeish had resigned over the "Officegate" scandal, in which Henry had failed to declare a constituency office sub-let. In a major victory for David and the SNP leader, one John Swinney, Henry was gone.

Blood was in the water. As John said at the time: “It is absurd for Jack McConnell to try to distance himself from a scandal within the party he leads”.

Neither Jack nor Henry received any money for personal use. Nobody seriously thinks either man made any deliberate, personal attempt to break the rules. In the end, Jack held on but Henry couldn’t.

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Others, over the years, have suffered the ultimate political fate.

Wendy Alexander, one of the truly great losses to Scottish politics, resigned in 2008 - a year after becoming Labour leader - over a campaign donation of less than £1,000 which was ruled illegal because it had come from a businessman based in Jersey.

My own boss and mentor, David, still the Tories’ best devolution leader, had resigned on Halloween in 2005 over taxi expenses; he had been taking taxis from the Scottish Parliament to the law firm at which he worked (against the rules), and the fact that this cost the taxpayer less than taking taxis to his Edinburgh home (in the rules) was a footnote.

Henry, David, Wendy. All good people - political giants in one way or another - and all lost to a political discourse which needed them, over matters which would likely have resulted in a slap on the wrist in any other workplace. Opponents and friends alike now trip over themselves to tell us that these "scandals" were in fact trivial, that there was a spontaneous and visceral feeding frenzy, and that none of those involved should have resigned.

Too late. They were the ones doing the feeding.

The indiscretions varied in seriousness, and in another 10 years we will look back on the Michael Matheson iPad debacle and rank that accordingly. Michael’s resignation had a sense of inevitability, having admitted that the £11,000 data bill incurred when his iPad was used as a hotspot in Morocco was a result of his sons watching football, rather than for Parliamentary business as he had initially claimed.

He said he wanted to protect his kids from exposure. I’d have done the same. And I’d also be wondering why my Parliament’s IT and procurement department oversaw a contract which allowed £11,000 to be charged for a volume of data which would cost you, reader, £10 at the supermarket.

Michael was extremely well regarded, particularly in his role as Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport. It was not in the public eye, but in private meetings with stakeholders that his star shone. His knowledge of the brief, and his strategic ability to link different policies and envision something bigger and better, made him reliable and popular in the industries for which he was responsible.

But off he went nonetheless, and the delirious parties of Henry, David and Wendy danced in the aisles.

Michael’s replacement as Health Secretary was Neil Gray. And so the world turns. Neil, it has been revealed over the last week, has attended football matches involving Aberdeen and Scotland at the invitation of the Scottish Football Association and the Scottish Professional Football League - variously during his tenures as the Cabinet Secretary responsible for sport or for the economy or for culture - and registered them under official ministerial business.

But Neil is an Aberdeen fan, and that red strip is now a metaphor for the blood in the water, churned by the engine of a Ministerial car.

I am so exhausted by this. I have been in Scottish politics for more than half of my life, and the country is in a worse state today than when I started. I am a devoted supporter of devolution, but I cannot look a friend in the eye and tell them that the country is demonstrably better for having the Scottish Parliament.

I use a transport network which, compared to our near neighbours on the continent, is probably half a century behind with no serious plan to catch up. My children use a state school system which is so unambitious and so lacking in scrutiny that we have no conclusive way of knowing just how badly we are doing, beyond our constant decline in international rankings. And we use a health service which receives an internationally generous proportion of taxpayer spending and yet produces real outcomes, affecting real people, which are definitively and depressingly poorer than other countries over the North Sea and English Channel.

Wendy AlexanderWendy Alexander (Image: Newsquest)

Neil’s week has not been spent on improving that crumbling service, or even talking about it. Instead of coming to Parliament to debate health, he comes to Parliament to defend decisions which would have been made by all of the opposition MSPs who demanded his attendance, had they been cabinet secretaries.

The SNP would do the same to Labour; Labour would do it to the Tories. There is no moral superiority here. We are all playing the same game. The opposition laments the awfulness of outcomes, but never plays the ball and always plays the man or woman. The Government obscures and denies the awfulness of outcomes but fails to use its platform or power to discuss great things and make great changes. We’ll deal with that tomorrow, just like we said we’d do yesterday.

During speaking engagements, I often ask audiences to raise their hand if they want to be an MSP. They are frozen still, as they’d be at an auction, afraid of bidding by mistake. And we wonder why.

Gladiator II is out. It reminds me of the first film, released just after the Scottish Parliament opened, actually. “Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome. This is not it. This is not it.”

Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters, and co-host of the Holyrood Sources podcast