AND THEN there was none. The loss of the Scottish National Party's parliamentary majority through maternity leave shows history has a sense of humour. The birth of the new Scotland could be forestalled by a birth. The opposition parties all say they won't take advantage of SNP MSP Angela Constance's joyous event, but just try stopping them.

It could leave Alex Salmond at the mercy of his old Nationalist enemy, Margo MacDonald, who technically holds the balance of power between Labour and the SNP, who for now both have 46 seats. Of course, Alex Salmond still has the Greens, and therein lies another irony. They lost five of their seven seats on May 3 - an electoral disaster - and yet they find themselves more influential than ever.

The Greens will get chairmanship of a key parliamentary committee and, if they play their cards right, a veto on environmental legislation. It's even suggested that the former SNP transport spokesman, Fergus Ewing, had to be parked as minister for Asbos because it would have been too provocative having the only climate-change denier left on the planet anywhere near energy, transport or the economy.

But the supreme irony of this extraordinary week was Alex Salmond being sworn in as first minister of Scotland in the court of session. Here was "the most dangerous man in Britain" who, we were told, intended to "wreck the UK", "ruin Scotland" and turn the country into "a haven for terrorists" being handed the Great Seal by the Lord President and 15 senior judges. Salmond the great outsider was finally embraced by the Scottish establishment, and he had a smile on his face the size of the Forth Bridge.

But you had to pinch yourself. Colleagues in the BBC talked of wrestling with their own disbelief in writing news lines about the "first minister, Alex Salmond".

It still felt like fantasy politics, a piece of political fiction; ditto the announcement of Salmond's "Cabinet secretaries". Just imagine what a row that would have caused in the past, when the very term "Scottish government" was considered controversial.

It's not only the media wrestling with the shock of it all. The new FM is still finding his feet in the unfamiliar atmosphere of Holyrood - "Mr, er, Presiding Officer" - so unlike the elite debating club he is used to in Westminster, where even the opposition accept a good argument and appreciate a well-rounded phrase.

The Commons is about camaraderie across party boundaries. But in Holyrood on Wednesday you could feel the hate radiating from the tongue-tied Labour opposition benches all the way up to the press gallery. Grace in defeat isn't something Labour have had time to learn, and Jack McConnell delivered a dreary recitation of his achievements in office, and a warning of fights to come.

Salmond, by contrast, delivered an acceptance speech which was witty, self-deprecating (yes, I know, from Alex) and even profound. Salmond invoked the spirit of the late Donald Dewar, promised a new "reflective democracy" of consensus and compromise, and even made a joke about independence not being very popular in the parliament. He pledged to govern in the Scottish national interest and the "commonweal" and insisted that whatever Labour say, Scotland "may be diverse, but is not divided". He had "the moral authority but not arbitrary authority" to govern in the interest of any narrow party, but only from the parliament as a whole.

Salmond's speech was an eloquent recognition that people elected him, not because they wanted independence as such, but because they just wanted something better. Across Scotland, from unionist and nationalist alike, there was an almost audible sigh of relief that here at last was a political leader in Holyrood who could rise to the occasion. After years of cookie-cutter mediocrity, and cringe-making oratory, someone at last with a sense of history. We haven't heard a speech like this since Donald Dewar died - and that is essentially why Labour have been rejected. They failed to deliver the most important promise of devolution - that Scotland would have a leadership of which it could be proud.

Mind you, Labour don't accept the SNP's moral authority and they don't believe for a second all the stuff about a caring, sharing parliament. Labour haven't really accepted defeat. Every Labour MSP I speak to repeats the mantra that "the SNP is gonna HAVE to learn that the people of Scotland didn't vote for independence". Er, no, but they didn't vote for Labour either.

GORDON Brown and Jack McConnell expect that the SNP administration will be abject failure, and collapse ignominiously in 18 months. In fact, they are already planning for the next Labour administration. McConnell is even preparing his own alternative legislative programme through private members' bills and committees, which he hopes will eclipse anything Salmond does. And they will trim his executive powers - on things like hospitals - by refusing to endorse an SNP budget to pay for them.

Gordon Brown's successor in the Treasury will choke off the flow of funds from London during the forthcoming spending squeeze. The former chancellor is a genius at fiscal manipulation and he will use every ounce of his guile to disrupt the financing of Salmond's "wee country". UK departments will refuse to recognise this supposed "government" in Edinburgh, and will lock Scotland out of negotiations in Europe. Think they wouldn't be so petty? Just wait.

Clearly, Salmond has little power to stop all this - he is pathetically weak in parliament. And the quality of Salmond's rhetoric last week was in inverse proportion to his ability to get things done. Boycotted by the Liberal Democrats - who are egregiously backing a minority Welsh nationalist first secretary in Cardiff, but wouldn't even sit down and talk with the largest party in Scotland - Salmond is on a political knife edge. He is a brilliant political operator, and capable of concealing his numerical weakness with the strength of his own character - but the weakness will tell.

Salmond has committed himself to the non-majoritarian politics of the consultative steering group (CSG) of the original Constitutional Convention, which argued for minority government as a matter of choice. But talking about holistic or collective politics is one thing, actually doing it is another. You can't simply put motion after motion before a parliament of 129 until you find one they all agree on. That isn't a "new and reflective democracy" - it is chaos, as we are likely to discover very soon. Coalition governments happen for a very good reason - to get things done.

The new politics is certainly about conciliation and compromise, give and take - but that requires goodwill, trust and reasonableness, and we've seen very little of those qualities since May 3. Consensus politics implies a willingness to sit down and negotiate, and above all it requires a forum in which the negotiating can take place, away from the glare of the media. For CSG politics to work you have to start seeing the entire parliament as one big coalition, which gets together and hammers out a common programme to put to the people.

Surprisingly, the people who seem most attuned to the new politics are the supposedly old-fashioned Scottish Conservatives, who are taking to holistic politics like a duck to water. Having decided a year ago that minority government was the future, they astutely concentrated not on coalition tactics, but on the key policies - business rates, drug rehab, affordable housing, Scottish Enterprise - which they believed would get them to first base in a parliament of minorities. They have already reached understandings with the Nats and believe they can get most of their election programme implemented.

So, another irony. The two parties who said they would not enter a coalition with each other, Tories and the SNP, have been the first to broker a new informal arrangement. No words were spoken, no partnership documents signed, but the understanding was struck the very day the Tories refused to save Jack McConnell. I suspect we may see the Tories implementing more of their legislative programme in the next couple of years than any party, the SNP included.

The Tories also followed the money. They understood that the key to delivery was to have proper costings for their pledges, unlike the other parties, who plucked figures out of thin air. It is one thing getting backslapping agreement on things like cutting class sizes, scrapping prescription charges, abolishing business rates and all that - but the real problems arise when you decide what other programmes are cut to pay for them. That's when holistic politics is likely to become holy war.

Without some rough agreements about how to pay for policies - many of which don't even need formal legislation - the budget process will come unstuck, and the entire parliament will collapse in a heap in September. The finance committee of the parliament is where many expect this pre-budgetary negotiation to happen, but I have my doubts. The committee is designed to scrutinise, not bargain, and is not intended to be a coalition Cabinet. It has no authority to conduct detailed negotiations over policies and funding, and no procedures with which to conduct them.

In some respects, the Garden Lobby of the Scottish parliament has become a kind of shadow parliament, where politicians of different parties can at least begin to speak to each other about these things. Serendipity plays a huge and unacknowledged role in politics, even in Westminster, where many initiatives begin simply with politicians bumping into each other. Talking with intent is even institutionalised in the confidentiality rules of the Members Lobby, where there is a convention that nothing said or overheard is attributable, and where rival politicians speak freely to each other, as adults.

But at the moment, the Garden Lobby is more like a school playground after a fight. One side is all daggers and muttering, while the other side is strutting around like it owns the place. The wimps in between are keeping their eyes shut until it all goes away. But eventually they will all be forced to open their eyes to the reality that Scotland is watching them. In a real sense, they are all in this together, and the Scottish voters will be savage in their retribution if any one side is seen to make this parliament fail.

This goes for the Nationalists as well as the others. The governing party is flattered by a leader who is one of the most gifted politicians of his generation. But this is not an administration composed of Alex Salmonds, but of inexperienced and brittle politicians, who aren't half as good as many of them think they are. The SNP proto-ministers, shooting their mouths off in the lobby, need to learn a little humility before they pronounce on the future.

They will have to learn fast, because it would be fatal if Salmond were to end up micromanaging the functions of his ministers. There are fewer of them than under Labour, and they will have to be smarter. There was a rather synthetic row last week about the reduction in the number of ministers, which was attacked by the opposition parties. I don't believe there are many people in Scotland who object to fewer ministerial Mondeos being parked under Holyrood. However, ministers with multi-briefs such as John Swinney - finance, climate change, enterprise, tourism, energy, transport, water, etc - are accidents waiting to happen. The SNP should convene its promised Scottish economic advisory council, including top businessmen and academics, as a matter of urgency.

The Nationalists need to mobilise civic Scotland if they are to have any chance of succeeding. They need to get support from outside parliament, from the press, from academic institutions, from business - and from outside Scotland. For Salmond, there is a larger stage to perform upon, as he leads the new devolved parliaments of Britain in their dealings with Westminster. With Sinn Fein/DUP in Stormont, possibly Plaid Cymru in Cardiff, and the SNP in Holyrood, the United Kingdom is entering a new and dramatic phase in constitutional relations.

These upstart administrations working in concert are not going to make life easy for Gordon Brown, especially now the UK Tories are looking to set up a kind of English parliament as well. Brown was always a great advocate for devolution. Now there's an irony.