When you’ve got the most famous Scot in the world watching you from the VIP seats, it’s not surprising that you should want to play to the gallery. But the act that Alex Salmond put on yesterday, as he sensed the eyes of Sir Sean Connery upon him, was so over the top that he would have been booed off the stage of the Glasgow Hippodrome. As for the Presiding Officer, who allowed him to get away with it, one wonders what he is there for. It aroused the normally benign Annabel Goldie to some untypical finger-pointing, and it prompted a former Nationalist stalwart, Margo Macdonald, to raise it as a point of order. But by then the Pantomime Dame had had his fun.

Of course, things were always going his way from the moment the Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, whispered into the microphone that she had lost her voice. Was it stress? Was it flu? Or had she taken too literally the advice of the psychiatrist who has allegedly been advising the party and has told them that Mr Salmond is vulnerable to the “strong, silent” treatment?

As Ms Goldie pointed out later, for Ms Alexander to be deprived of words was “a strange phenomenon”, but her breathy announcement that her opening question would also be her last made it clear that, on the day when her political future was to be decided, she herself had nothing to say. It was left to her deputy, Cathy Jamieson, to put the supplementaries, by which Mr Salmond was not unduly tested.

Like Andy Murray, who needs a hard-hitting opponent to bring out the best in his play, Mr Salmond needs tough questions if he is to shine. And Ms Goldie, for the Tories, gave him precisely that. She accused him of broken promises, called him “more brazen than brash”, and then took him through a litany of undelivered SNP pledges.

Feigning surprise, Mr Salmond claimed that the SNP government had delivered 137 manifesto commitments. One day, some anorak is going to check up on that, but in the meantime Mr Salmond whittled it down to what he called his “magnificent seven” which included some familiar claims about frozen council taxes and, inevitably, the “historic concordat” with the local authorities.

Ms Goldie is not the only one to profess that she is heartily sick of hearing about the concorrrdat (roll the Rs to get the full effect), and she gave thanks for the recess that would deliver us all from its endless repetition. But when she accused Mr Salmond of creating a “soft touch” Scotland by releasing prisoners too early, and “dumbing down” the criminal justice system in the process, the First Minister stepped up a gear. He called her views “immature and irresponsible”, and then began reading from an article written in a Sunday newspaper by one of her former colleagues, Brian Monteith. In it, Mr Monteith, who is really neither here nor there, had suggested that, while Ms Goldie may be “a game old bird” with a “St Trinian’s sense of humour”, she is not the right leader of the party.

At this point, Alex Fergusson, the Presiding Officer, might have politely inquired what part of the question this addressed — a subtle way of telling Mr Salmond to back off. But he did nothing, which rendered Ms Goldie furious, and only encouraged Mr Salmond to indulge in yet further ribaldry, reading out some more snippets from that day’s press.

Now, all of this certainly raises the decibel level in the chamber, but it does nothing for the gravity of parliament or the responsibilities of the office of First Minister. Someone should tell Mr Salmond to forget the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd and just get on with the job.

We’ll have to wait for the autumn to see if he has learnt his lines. In the meantime, however, he has a Hollywood superstar to attend to.

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