Can you believe her? Should you believe her?

Nicola Sturgeon's return to parliament raised more questions than she answered about the police investigation

Motorhome what motorhome? The former SNP national treasurer, Colin Beattie, told reporters he “didn't know” that the SNP had bought, during his tenure, that £100,000 Niesmann and Bischoff luxury motorhome seized by police three weeks ago. Later he changed his mind. Oh, THAT £100,000, Niesmann and Bischoff luxury motorhome, dammit. Beattie issued a statement saying that of course he knew about it because it was in the accounts for 2020/21 that he signed off.

That lapse of memory from the former banker who had charge of the SNP accounts for 20 years was pretty much par for the course as the SNP continued to dig itself further and further into the financial bunker. No one knows nothing. Nada. Except, when they do. Certainly not Nicola Sturgeon - who may have wished she had chosen a different moment to make her return to the scene.

While she faced the cameras in Holyrood, a ruckus was starting elsewhere. The SNP Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, and his predecessor in the post, Ian Blackford, were accusing each other of lying about when the Westminster group knew it had no auditor for its accounts. Flynn says Blackford kept it from him; Blackford says Flynn told him that a replacement auditor had been found. You pays your money - or in the SNP's case, perhaps you don't. The SNP parliamentary group, the third largest party in the UK, still can't find an auditor for its annual accounts. Flynn says they risk losing £1.2 million in Short Money if they don't submit accounts to the House of Commons authorities by next month. And no jokes, please, about the SNP being short of a bob or two.

But laugher aside, and this whole affair has entered the realms of situation comedy, it is as always the credibility of the Third Woman on the 2021 accounts, Nicola Sturgeon, on whom the SNP's future rests. Perhaps rashly she has waded in to the media maelstrom. The former First Minister gave one of her classic deadpan dismissals of certain allegations of foreknowledge.

Do we believe her? Can we believe her? Read on...