Is the honeymoon over?  Is the tide finally beginning to turn against Alex Salmond? These questions are no longer wishful thinking as the First minister’s opponents seek to find ways to turn what might be a slight reverse into a full-scale retreat.

For the Unionist parties, tackling Salmond’s seeming omnipotence is crucial if they are to engineer a defeat of the SNP in 2011, for without Salmond the SNP would never have become the government.

Take yourself back to the days when John Swinney finally threw in the leadership towel.  His tenure had been earnestly sincere, sanctimonious even, and the Scottish public did not warm to him.

Swinney foolishly positioned his party to the left of the Labour - Liberal Democrat coalition, usually supporting the government’s Bills but complaining that not enough taxpayers’ money was being spent or that government interventions did not go far enough.  This only served to feed the Tommy Sheridan tiger – a tactical and costly mistake, because Sheridan is a charismatic orator and Swinney is neither. In the 2003 elections the SNP fell backwards, mostly to a motley assortment of greens, Trots and independents.

Once the SNP leadership elections started it was clear that the unbridled sentiment of the activists was for their Red Rose - Roseanna Cunningham – a sort of feminine Tommy Sheridan without the tan.  Salmond’s favoured princess, the able Ice Maiden of the West, Nicola Sturgeon, was set to lose. It was a defeat Salmond, the King over the Water in Westminster was not prepared to let happen – so he stepped forward to challenge Roseanna himself and Nicola moved to stand as Deputy. This Abbot and Costello double act, with Sturgeon playing the straight man, was a racing certainty.

At the time, Salmond’s relative detachment from Holyrood looked like a disadvantage, but it was in fact to work in his favour, being blameless for an unpopular parliament’s more outrageous or unpopular decisions. Come the real election Salmond had the upper hand in personality against the unappealing Jack McConnell, and played up to this with the brilliant tactical move of allowing his own name on the second vote ‘list’ ballot paper.  Such was the number of votes that this ploy garnered, instead of losing list members to balance up against the first-past-the-post gains, the SNP won additional list MSPs that no-one had anticipated.

Without Salmond the SNP could not have beaten Labour to become the largest party in Holyrood, albeit by one seat, and since then none of his ministers have come anywhere near him in impact or popularity with the public. The opposition will know that were he to lose credibility and become unpopular the SNP would most likely be in serious trouble.  Bursting Salmond’s balloon has, however, proven easier said than done.  Given the oxygen of power by the Conservatives, two Greens and Margo MacDonald, Salmond has used his good humoured, sure-footed quick-thinking to paint the walls of Holyrood with his opponents blood.

Being clever did not make Wendy Alexander bright or give her Salmond’s common touch and she suffered a mostly torrid time against the First Minister, while Annabel Goldie is usually just patronised as an amateur by a real politician on his game.

My own view, for what it’s worth, has always been that Salmond’s biggest danger is himself, he lives off his ego and may ultimately drown in his own hubris.  He IS accident-prone and given enough rope he may not hang himself, but might tie himself up in knots.  Unfortunately for politicians they don’t always have time to wait on self-destruction, an election looms in just over two years time – with a no doubt influential general election before that.

The SNP strategy seems clear enough, try not to be overambitious and do things that will cause unpopularity or deliver regular defeats in parliament – unless that would turn the party into martyrs.  Meanwhile, let the First Minister defend Scotland’s interests, not least by picking fights where none previously existed with Westminster in general and Gordon Brown in particular.  This plays up to Salmond’s strengths while keeping the SNP’s more embarrassing and lunatic backbenchers out of the public eye.

So far this approach has resulted in, amongst others, a council tax freeze, a commitment to reduce class sizes, free school meals for primary classes P1-P3 and put more police on the beat. If policies can be delivered without legislation, then all the better, as they would be more difficult to stop.  Where a Bill is required for a policy that could look popular – such as introducing a Local Income Tax – a bargain could be struck in case it were to be defeated.

Oh, and let’s not forget, a referendum on opening up negotiations for a full and sovereign independent Scotland by 2011.

Unsurprisingly it is in Holyrood that the SNP strategy has met the greatest opposition - although not enough for my liking - with the Conservatives especially missing a number of opportunities to embarrass the Scottish Government.  Nevertheless, bothering about what happens in Holyrood misses the point – the public really doesn’t care!  MSPS tend to see everything from looking out of those expensive Holyrood windows; they should look down onto the street and notice hardly anyone’s looking at them. That’s why the SNP is riding the polls despite reverses on the under-21 off-sales proposals or the failure to reduce class sizes or put Bobby’s on the beat.

What really matters is what makes the first three pages of the newspapers, the thirty-second clips on the TV news and the radio sound bites on drivetime. Giving the media what it wants is Salmond’s forte, so yet again we come back to Salmond being the key figure - so can anyone find his Achilles heel?

Lately, the new Labour leader, Iain Gray, has shown it is possible to unnerve the First Minister at question time – and since the banking crisis descended upon us Salmond’s reputed economic insight has been usurped by his preference of cheap jibes.

His allegation that “spivs and speculators” (by implication in London, of course) were the cause of HBOS requiring a Lloyds TSB rescue were wide off the mark – short selling in HBOS actually fell in the week it needed saved - but it gave him prominence in what was essentially a UK story. The First Minister’s subsequent requests for the Treasury to emulate the Dublin government by guaranteeing all bank deposits had more to do with pointing to Ireland’s limited freedom to act than with any economic or financial case that could be afforded.

His offer of £100 million to save HBOS now looks the puny sum it was relative to Gordon Brown’s rescue plan of £750 BILLION – and the bale-out of HBOS and RBS to the tune of £30 billion - equivalent to his government’s annual spend - undermines considerable his independence argument.

It is in the current financial maelstrom is exactly where the First Minister should be challenged – for it is through British resources and British influence that the solutions are being found for Scotland’s top banks. Salmond called it wrong on HBOS, he called it wrong on the subsequent banking collapse. Then there are the examples of Ireland, Iceland and even Norway requiring financial assistance - his much vaunted ‘Arc of Prosperity’ is looking more like an Arc of dependency now.

But when Salmond makes a mistake the people have to be told, and so far his stumbles are going unnoticed. Every exaggeration, every cheap shot, every error should be picked up and criticised, amplified through every journal that will carry a quote, or better still a guest column by an MSP. Every Ministerial failure should be laid at the Salmond’s front door, tarring him with their failure, eroding his gloss until there’s none left. I just don’t see it happening.  The opposition has to up its game and take its opposition out of Holyrood and into the media or Salmond, and therefore the SNP, shall win by default.

Soon, the Glenrothes by-election will be held and, with the current failure offer any resistance likely to continue it is likely to give Salmond the fillip he needs to bounce right back and dominate the Scottish scene.  His honeymoon may indeed be over, but from where I’m standing a second honeymoon in 2011 is a racing certainty.