We’re grumpy this morning, readers, because it’s Sunday and we were planning a long lie and then someone told us about this. It’s the First Minister appearing on the Sophy Ridge show on Sky News at around 8.45am and you need to see it.

It was quite the performance.

Nothing we could say to you will be more revealing than just watching the entire clip for yourself. It’s such a piece of nervy, jittery evasion and deflection that sometimes it’s hard not to switch it off – indeed, the person who alerted us couldn’t make it to the end.

So we’ll restrict ourselves to noting a couple of key points, because otherwise almost every sentence of it could be dissected and we’d be here all day.

Sturgeon starts off by completely swerving Ridge’s question about when she knew of the investigation about Salmond, which we suspect is because she wants to avoid the embarrassment of having to repeat her pathetic excuse about having “forgotten” about her meeting with Geoff Aberdein on 29 March 2018.

She repeatedly – even when Ridge mentions Aberdein specifically – pretends to misunderstand that Ridge is talking about a separate matter in 2017, in which Aberdein had no involvement, when an allegation was made about events at Edinburgh Airport.

(Nothing ever came of that allegation, because it was so ludicrous and feeble that it didn’t even manage to get onto a charge sheet where Salmond was accused of crimes as heinous as “pinging” someone’s hair in a lift. It was also completely false.)

Quite interestingly, in an interview with Andrew Marr in October 2018, Sturgeon had categorically denied having ever heard ANYTHING about ANY allegations of a sexual nature against Salmond until the ones she heard about in “April” 2018.

Yet in her written evidence to the committee she says “I spoke to Mr Salmond about this [November 2017] allegation at the time”, which inescapably means that she was definitely lying to Marr when she denied any knowledge of it 11 months later.

Throughout the whole 10-minute section Sturgeon never does answer Ridge’s opening question, continually ducking it with the 2017 misdirection. Ridge is persistent but not quite on top of her brief, so she lets Sturgeon off the hook a couple of times, such as when Sturgeon remarkably denies ever having said she “forgot” about the meeting with Aberdein, even though she says so in her own written evidence to the committee.

RIDGE: You said that you forgot that you first found out from his chief-of-staff.

STURGEON: No, I didn’t say that.

Sturgeon also trots out her trusty squirrel of claiming that people are accusing her of both conspiring against and colluding with Salmond, although we can’t remember the last time anyone actually accused her of the latter. (The nervous giggle as she says it is almost as telling as the number of times she blinks throughout the interview.)

She repeatedly basically says Salmond’s guilty anyway, insisting that the whole thing is his fault for behaving badly even if what he did wasn’t technically criminal, and refers to the single such incident that Salmond admitted – an occasion when two mildly tipsy and fully clothed consenting adults slightly crossed a professional boundary, the more senior one apologised for allowing it to happen, the apology was accepted and they continued to work together.

Outrageously, she then attempts to claim that Salmond’s evident anger at Sturgeon ISN’T because she conspired to try to have him imprisoned for the rest of his life for crimes he didn’t commit, but because she refused to “collude” with him to stop any investigation ever happening – something that, once again, HER OWN submission to the committee shows as a plain and simple lie.

What Salmond actually did was attempt to solve the matter through arbitration and warn the Scottish Government that its inquiry was flawed, biased and illegal and would be expensively defeated in court – something which proved to be precisely the case when the Scottish Government backed down in a panic at the last moment rather than let its crooked machinations be publicly exposed in the courtroom.

(Indeed, on 8 January 2019 Sturgeon had told Parliament very firmly that after her meetings with Salmond on the subject she did not intervene, and did not feel under any pressure to do so, ie from him.)

Had Sturgeon listened then, she wouldn’t be digging herself into a bigger and bigger hole now. We watched Casino on telly a couple of nights ago and Joe Pesci’s grisly death scene was barely any grimmer than Sturgeon’s performance this morning.

It was the interview equivalent of being clubbed to a bloody mess with steel baseball bats and thrown bleeding but still alive into a shallow ditch. We fear Nicola Sturgeon’s eventual political end will not, unlike Nicky Santoro’s, benefit from the cameras turning away at the final moment to spare us the horror.