Funny how we spend the first part of the year being told by Labour that if Scotland gets a nationalist government, then biblical-style plague, pestilence and flood will be visited upon the land - yet as soon as Alex Salmond takes power, the storm clouds deluge England instead. Admittedly, that may not seem quite so funny if you live in Gloucester, Sheffield or Hull.

With the SNP retaining control of events, and the weather being relatively kind, one summer game is to scan the horizon for political storm clouds bubbling up. We all know the administration will be hit by “events” - some predictable, some not. The fun is in guessing them in advance. The budget seems an obvious candidate. Not only does it look uncomfortably tight, but so does the timetable for setting it. That will dominate ministerial thinking in October and November.

Another one worth a weather eye is CalMac. The Hebridean ferry operator – a company wholly owned by Scottish ministers, with a large dose of subsidy – is a dead cert to be given the tender to continue operating when the new arrangements start at the start of October. The two other bidders pulled out. But the SNP will also face the uncomfortable fact that European procurement rules may require them to have its ships built on the Baltic, for which lots of past opposition indignation can be quoted back at them.
And then there is the European Commission. The tendering process, required by Brussels rules, is widely seen as a burach, either because it was mishandled or a waste of money.

But don’t think the Eurocrats have lost interest in Hebridean ferries. They will be paying particular attention to an academic study, part funded by the Commission and published this week by Napier University, which found that CalMac should be removed from public ownership.

It concludes the tendering has been “more or less designed to maintain the status quo and hence continuation of extensive state-owned shipping operations in Scotland”.

“Scottish Executive policy on shipping matters seems at best confused and at worst discriminatory. There is a strong emphasis on maintaining, protecting and expanding state-owned shipping operations, to the disadvantage of private operators”.

Subsidies adversely affect private operators, reducing the potential for investment and innovation, it goes on. “Scottish Executive shipping policy seems entirely at odds with EU policy, the latter supporting continued market liberaralisation and modernisation of shipping services”.

“The Scottish Executive urgently needs to consider the process by which it might withdraw from owning and operating shipping businesses... it might be anticipated the European Commission will expect no less an outcome”.

Now, supposing you were the European transport commissioner, unhappy with the way the Hebridean ferries have been tendered, wouldn’t that be extremely helpful ammunition to get the whole process revisited?

And supposing you were an SNP minister, would you want to be the one who has to explain to the Scottish Parliament and the party conference why CalMac is going to be privatised?