Douglas Fraser: "How do we score the Commission/ Conversation battle between the SNP and Unionists?"

How do you solve a problem like a First Minister? Always stick to your point. Never, ever stray on to his turf. It's dangerous.

Stick to your point as though manacled to it, and treat his turf as camouflage for an elephant trap.

Forget these rules and Alex Salmond will be waltzing off into the distance, bellowing speeches that have nothing whatever to do with the questions you were trying to ask.

You, conversely, will be in a hole you didn't see coming, and as miffed - this has become the current yardstick - as Wendy Alexander was yesterday.

All politicians practice the art of the hijack, but few are as consummate in sheer banditry as our First Minister.

A naive observer might have wondered how some reasonable questions about cuts in council services became a row over a multi-option constitutional referendum. The Labour leader knows the answer.

She mentioned the plebiscite. It was the merest aside - something about Mr Salmond "trying to gerrymander his way to independence" - but it was enough. The ball was in play.

Disability day-care centres and Aberdeen council's crisis? Cuts in services across the country? These were real issues, or rather one issue (who pays?), but you could almost see the First Minister limbering up.

There was some preliminary quibbling over blame for the cuts. The heart of the matter, if anyone cared, is that councils get much of their money from Edinburgh, but Edinburgh gets all of its money from London. Promises become post-dated cheques.

Ms Alexander hit Mr Salmond well and hard, nevertheless, in the early exchanges. Bluntly, the SNP's "historic agreement" with local government might seem less than impressive, currently, if you are disabled in Aberdeen.

But then temptation arrived, and she couldn't resist. Why pay for jokes if you don't use them? "A series of single transferable excuses," she mocked. Now, thought this observer, what's the one thing the Eck would like to talk about this week?

He was off. Labour didn't care for it. Labour cared even less for the fact that there was not a thing they could do about it. In any case, as Mr Salmond said, leaving local government finance as a distant memory, they are "languishing" in the polls.

Still, poor Labour has not always despised the multi-option route to national salvation, the First Minister noted. Soon enough, Donald Dewar, John Smith, and even a certain Gordon Brown were marched into the lobby.

Elephant traps need preparation. From the recesses of his memory, or perhaps from his script, the First Minister produced the claim that Mr Brown had called for a multi-option poll in a May Day speech.

Admittedly, this was back in 1992. But who was a groomed-for-stardom Labour researcher at that time?

The Wendy Alexander in question would have loved the chance to respond. The timing of Mr Salmond's strike, by pure coincidence, allowed no such opportunity. Tories and Liberals received like treatment.

You might call it the judgment of history. You might also describe it as Mr Salmond's interpretation of the expression "You can talk".

Annabel Goldie propounded the view that the best way to reduce prison numbers is to reduce crime - amazing - but felt that we should meanwhile bang up miscreants regardless.

Mr Salmond observed that the Tories built no new prisons in 17 years; that absconding was a bigger problem then than now; and that Ms Goldie's party had introduced automatic early release.

Nicol Stephen had fun with changed SNP attitudes towards the Reliance "Lags'R'Us" service. The First Minister reminded us that the Liberals, in government, had been rather less agitated.

Questions, anyone?