So how will the two cases fare? The way I see it, the arguments fit into three phases.

Phase One: Principles

Put simply, the question here is, do we want to consider the other questions? Is independence worth thinking about, let alone seeking? Both sides have their totem poles, with supporters anticipating a modern, forward-looking independent Scotland that can act solely in the interest of its people; Unionists believe that Scotland benefits from being part of a larger whole. Scotland free or a desert versus stronger together, weaker apart.

Both sides have to win the hearts and minds of the Scottish electorate, and it’s this phase of the argument which appeals to the heart. The problem is, the mind often gets abandoned and it gets mired in cliché and unfortunate language.

Take Joan McAlpine. There’s no doubt that the substance of her comments last week held water: despite continued and strong support for a referendum (even among people who would happily vote No), and despite figures – prominent figures – in the three Unionist parties arguing for a referendum, it’s taken years for the leaderships to get to where we are this week. First there was no call for a referendum – even when there clear was – then, it wasn’t the right time to discuss the issue – even though the same people arguing that would then list the reasons why their position on it was right in the next breath – then, when all else failed, they didn’t want anything to do with a referendum because it was Alex Salmond’s idea. Even now, the UK Government position started the week at formally transferring the power to hold a binding vote on independence to Scotland, but only if it held it in a manner approved by Westminster, which makes a mockery of devolution.

So there is, at best, a disconnect between the leaderships of the three Unionist parties and the Scottish electorate – even their own supporters. The middle ground is that there’s a mistrust on the part of those leaderships as regard whether or not the electorate will produce the ‘right’ answer. At worst, there’s an out and out contempt for the voters inherent in the assumption that they’d swallow such guff and tolerate the verbal (and in some cases, mental) gymnastics being performed by Unionist politicians.

But does that make them anti-Scottish? Even if it does, for Heaven’s sake, don’t say that! Instead of being forced to argue on the substantive points that Joan McAlpine was making, the Opposition managed to duck the issues altogether and merely protest in outrage at a perceived slight.

Of course, now that they have protested that slight, I’m sure that Unionists of all persuasions will back off from the spurious accusation of ‘anti-Englishness’ on the other side. Won’t they?

That’s the problem with this part of the argument: there is little substance and it’s all about sentiment – for good and ill!

Phase Two: Practicality

What makes the 2014 campaign different from the 1997 referendum campaign is that came with a White Paper which had been drawn up after years of deliberation on the part of the Scottish Constitutional Convention: we knew precisely what was being proposed and what mechanisms would be at work.

Now, the idea of independence is relatively straightforward – it’s tempting for supporters to ask in exasperation: “what part of ‘independence’ don’t you understand?”

But as we’ve already seen, there are questions about the potential outcome of the negotiations in the case of a ‘yes’ vote. The currency is the main question: Sterling? The Euro? The “Groat”?

Well, even this has subsidiary questions: would an independent Scotland be forced to adopt the Euro? Unionists argue that Scotland would effectively be negotiating for re-entry to the EU as a new member state, and would, accordingly, be required to adopt the acquis communautaire in full, with no opt out as the UK negotiated from the Single Currency at Maastricht. Nationalists counter by citing the precedent of Greenland, which on acquisition of new foreign policy powers, opted to quit the Common Market, but had to negotiate to withdraw, but wouldn’t have had to do so to remain. The truth is that we don’t know which is the case and won’t know until the outcome of the negotiations: as far as I’m aware, no EU Treaty has ever anticipated the secession of a constituent part of a member state, and the Greenland precedent doesn’t cover what happens if that constituent part then wants to remain within the wider European Union. It’s uncharted territory.

Equally, we don’t know the state of the Single Currency come 2014 when the decision will actually be taken. Euro-pessimists might openly question if there might even be a Euro by then for Scotland to be a part of; Euro-optimists might cite that the Euro’s infancy was troubled as its value on the international currency market plummeted, but it survived and regained a measure of credibility until the onset of the current crisis. They would argue that by 2014, membership of the Euro might not look so bad after all.

So the answer to the currency question hinges on a legal position we don’t yet know, and circumstances we can’t yet predict. Now, things will become clearer with time, but some things – like the final currency position, and doubtless defence and foreign policy infrastructure – wouldn’t be settled until after the vote, after negotiations had been concluded.

That gives an advantage to the Unionists, but it’s not a full one: they have to answer what the alternative is. The Scotland Bill? Devo-max? Just as we need to know what independence means in reality, we also need to know what Scotland’s place in the Union would look like after a vote. As the possibility of a second question on devo-max seems to be receding for the moment, and as the Scotland Bill has been well and truly overshadowed by events, it’s no longer obvious just what a No vote means. By contrast, the No campaign in 1997 had a clear (if unappealing) idea: Direct Rule, and the continuation of the Scottish Grand Committee. The status quo, in other words. Now, a No vote will just open up a new debate.

Phase Three: Policy

Again, the 2014 campaign contrasts with the 1997 campaign: did those who voted know that they were voting for a Parliament which would abolish Section 28 before Westminster? That they’d overturn tuition fees? That bridge tolls would be abolished? I’m not sure they did. I suspect that everyone understood that had a Parliament been in place ten years earlier, the Poll Tax would never have happened, but beyond that, what were the policy discussions?

This time, we have a better understanding of what politicians in an independent Scotland would do. We know that the preference is to remain in the EU; we know that the preference is to get rid of Trident. But just as the debate in 1997 was framed against the Tories’ policies between 1979 and 1997, so the 2014 debate will largely be framed against UK Government policy.

And given the unpopularity of the Coalition Government, it’s advantage independence. On most if not all reserved policy, the Tories and LibDems are relentlessly criticised, so if the campaign is framed as a Scottish Government versus UK Government contest, the Yes campaign can win: just look at last May’s elections. The Scottish Government’s party left Session 3 with 47 MSPs and entered Session 4 with 69. The UK Government’s member parties left Session 3 with 33 MSPs between them (counting Alex Fergusson as a Tory seeking re-election as a Tory) and entered session 4 with just 20. Meanwhile, Labour, as the Opposition in both Parliaments, is cut out of the debate unless the Labour Leader in one Chamber or the other (or possibly both) looks like a shoo-in for Government come the next election. That means that Labour has to find either a personality or a replacement for Ed Miliband at Westminster, and Johann Lamont has to get her policy slate together by 2014 – including her policy on the constitution! If the Scottish people think that a Tory Government is the likely outcome of the 2015 election, or if the politician in the key position to argue against independence – the Leader of the Scottish Opposition – has no clear vision of what Scotland still in the Union should look like, independence looks like the clearer, safer option. That the No campaign doesn’t even have a clear leader or structure yet makes finding that structure, that narrative of a post-referendum Scotland in the Union that much harder.

So given that first principle debates result in a no-score draw with each side only appealing to its own supporters, it all comes down to the terms of the substantive debate: do we focus on the practicalities of the negotiations – in which case there are enough variables to make people uncertain about independence – or do we focus in what policies Scotland would be a part of in either case – in which case independence becomes more tangible and attractive?

More than likely, each side will fight on its stronger foot: the pro camp going for what an independent Scotland would be able to do, and the anti camp highlighting all the pitfalls on the way.

Let’s see which case engages the voters more.

But I thought that following Stuart‘s post, I’d better stick my head above the parapet, in an attempt to a) just chip in my two cents and b) upstage him. In any case, much as I’m grateful to Stuart for describing my absence from the Total Politics blog list as ‘unexpected’, I have to disagree: I somehow managed to miss the whole thing! I have no idea how it passed me by but it did. But in any case, I never campaigned (or even publicly acknowledged, as I never wanted to look like I was canvassing) for a place on the lists, so ignorance of the process is no excuse: not posting since July probably has more to do with it.

But that’s really the point of this: the Notebook is a failed experiment. It was a reaction to changing circumstances, right enough, but the changes are sufficient that bloggery just no longer features the way it did.

It was supposed to re-kindle my interest in putting my thoughts on screen – it hasn’t.

I was supposed to get by blogging mojo back – I haven’t!

I keep thinking that I should post about the Tory Leadership election (and the existential crisis that has really come about a decade later than it should have done), or the Murphy/Boyack Review (which seems eerily similar to the Sanderson Report with Murdo Fraser is now proposing junking), or the LibDems apparently blazing a trail in opposition and winning over the commentariat while the opinion polls show Willie Rennie’s approval to be lower than Tavish Scott’s. But I keep not blogging about any of it!

So long story short, the blog’s dead and as I always argued, that hardly matters: it’s not going to leave a vacuum. I can always chip in on Twitter, on the comment pages, on forums and the like, but honestly, it’s time to finally yield the floor. As I used to sign off the Roundups back in the day:

Bye-de-bye!

We know that politicians who have spent years grovelling at the altar of Murdoch now line up to stick the boot in.

It looks like a seven-day Sun will replace the News of the World. But we do not yet know how this will affect the News International takeover of BSkyB. Indeed, the working theory is that the paper has been closed to protect that move.

What we can discern is that if Vince Cable hadn’t opened his trap to the Telegraph undercover journalists last year, it would have been him presiding over the decision to permit (or not) that takeover, not Jeremy Hunt. He might not have won his ‘war on Rupert Murdoch’ outright, but could have scored some significant battles. Instead, the decision falls to a far more sympathetic Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, who has opted to spend the evening not discussing the fate of a major part of the country’s media, but glad-handing at the Harry Potter premiere.

So what now? Ed Miliband will be feeling quite smug tonight – he’s scored a hit against News International, in a week where his handling of the phone-hacking row was perceived to be far superior to his reaction to last week’s strikes. A major battle won – a scalp claimed. His leadership safe, perhaps?

Perhaps not. The reason politicians went grovelling to the Sun was that they didn’t not want to make an enemy of it – they remember that 1992 front page and they don’t want it to be their face in the lightbulb at the next election. If Miliband does claim a victory today, they’ll do what they can to stop him claiming a far more important one in 2015.

Unless. Rival titles may well scent blood at this time, especially as Rebekah Brooks – the then editor who presided over the phone-hacking – is still in position at News International and the Murdoch empire has acted to save its own skin. If it can pull the plug on the News of the World – as it did on the unprofitable Today newspaper 16 years ago – then don’t expect it to be sentimental about the Super Soaraway if it ends up becoming the story. Moreover, there are inquiries into the whole phone-hacking culture on the way. This is going to get uglier before it lets up.

One last thing: the Sun dominates the tabloid market in England, but in Scotland the picture is clouded by the presence of the Daily Record, whose circulation the Sun has only recently overtaken. Moreover, the football season in Scotland begins far earlier than in England: on 23 July. And Sunday tabloids love their football coverage, going out of their way to promote it in the hope that it will reel the punters in.

That means the Sun has two weeks to get a seven-day edition out. Otherwise, the Record’s sister paper, the Sunday Mail, has the field to itself, and can grab the NotW’s Scottish readership on the first weekend of the new season. If the Record’s managers are smart, that edition of the Sunday Mail will be packed to the gills will offers for the weekday paper.

So this might not have that much impact in the long run in England: the Sun might soldier on for seven days a week, preparing for vengeance against Ed Miliband, Chris Bryant and Tom Watson. But in Scotland, this could turn the tide in the War of the Tabloids. Could the Record, in decline for years, its journalism (at least, in the political column) getting ever more ludicrous and detached from reality in its attempts to defend Scottish Labour, and itself having to shed 90 jobs to keep going, have the last laugh over everyone?

We shall see.

Labour 15,118 (53.81%, down 2.16%)
SNP 9,280 (33.03%, up 15.50%)
Conservative 2,784 (9.91%, down 2.09%)
Liberal Democrat 627 (2.23%, down 11.12%)
UKIP 288 (1.03%, down 0.13%)

Depending on who you listen to, this was either a good night for Labour and a bad night for the SNP, or a good night for the SNP and a bad night for Labour. Apart from that, everyone wants to talk about the LibDem collapse. Again. So is this really the start of Labour’s fightback, or is momentum still with the SNP? Is there anything worth saying about the Tories, and are the LibDems really as knackered as the result suggests? And are UKIP flogging a dead horse?

Labour

On the face of it, this was a good result coming so soon as it did after the Holyrood election and following a campaign where it was thought that the best Labour could hope for was a win of about 1,500 – so a win of almost four times that is something to be cheered, surely?

Scratch the surface. Yes, Labour picked up 15,118 votes, and yes, that was almost 3,000 more than in the (albeit smaller) Greenock & Inverclyde constituency two months ago. But it’s almost 6,000 fewer than Labour picked up in the Westminster General Election last year. In the space of just fourteen months, Labour in Inverclyde has lost more than a quarter of its Westminster polling day support.

The figures are get more damning: the decrease in Labour vote share against 2010 is greater than the Labour 2007-11 Holyrood Constituency Vote decrease both nationally and locally. In other words, Labour’s position is actually worsening and the result is more a testament to Scottish Labour’s underlying strength in a Westminster contest than anything else.

And it’s that strength that will see them through: the swings seen at Inverclyde would – if a General Election were held tomorrow – see Labour unseat Jo Swinson in East Dunbartonshire, but lose Gordon Banks in Ochil & South Perthshire, and Eric Joyce in Falkirk. A net loss of one seat on a more adverse swing than that which delivered the Holyrood Constituency wipeout – a wipeout that, let’s not forget, Greenock & Inverclyde resisted.

Labour won in a contest where they tend to do well, in an area where they still do well: it’s fair to say that this is not yet the start of the Labour fightback. But even if it were, that’s what they said about Glenrothes in November 2008 – in June 2009, the SNP won the European Election. That’s also what they said about Glasgow North East in November 2009, and six months later Labour were able to recover their By-Election losses and hold out where other parts of the UK saw the party’s support wilt. But this was Iain Gray’s springboard into Bute House, and history will record that he fell off the springboard and got his ankle trapped in it. Labour have a long, long way to go yet.

SNP

A reality check? Perhaps. Tails were up, and the predictions were that the SNP could reduce Labour’s majority from almost fifteen thousand to about a tenth of that. That wasn’t to be, though the gap was more than halved. And while the SNP picked up 11,876 votes in the smaller Holyrood constituency in May, it only managed 9,280 this time.

Again, scratch the surface. In the space of fourteen months, SNP support in Inverclyde for a Westminster contest has gone up by almost 50% – 6,577 last year to over 9,000 on Thursday, with a vote increase of 15.5%, more than the party notched up two months ago, and were this to be repeated at that mythical General Election To Be Held Tomorrow, the SNP would go from six MPs to 14: gaining Ochil & South Perthshire and Falkirk from Labour, and a further six LibDem seats – Argyll & Bute; Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross; Edinburgh West; Gordon; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey and West Aberdeenshire & Kincardine. Meanwhile, opinion polls seem to put the LibDems on 13 seats across the UK, so it’s now a possibility that the SNP could displace the Liberal Democrats as the third largest party in the Commons.

Nevertheless, we all know that the LibDem/SNP battle is a red herring: at Holyrood, a swing smaller than the one seen at Inverclyde ushered in an SNP majority, as the party had managed to convince people that they offered the best solutions, best representatives and best Government for Scotland. The former strongholds of Donald Dewar, John Smith, Robin Cook, George Robertson and even Gordon Brown all turned yellow. But at Westminster, those swings would be enough to hand only two Labour seats to the SNP – that marks out the gulf there, and the SNP absolutely has to change perceptions: Labour won because it was seen as the best best for a Westminster election. The SNP still has to show that voting for their candidates at Westminster will get them somewhere – and somewhere good. It has just under four years to find and develop that narrative.

Conservatives

Has anyone even acknowledged that they were on the ballot paper since the result? Talk has been about the first, second and fourth placed candidates – the Tories have been skipped over completely, and I suppose from a publicity point of view, that makes the result disastrous for them most of all. At least the LibDems are getting mentioned in the papers.

Anyway. It’s worth noting that have somehow managed to lose nearly two thousand votes in just over a year, and saw their vote fall by 2.09% against 2010. On the other hand, they found 750 voters that they didn’t pick up in May – though they could have simply been living in Kilmacolm, the part of Inverclyde not found in the Holyrood seat, and, most notably, part of the only ward in Inverclyde to have elected a Tory Councillor. Still, the 2.09% swing is considerably better than the 4.1% decrease they experienced in the Holyrood seat so it looks like the Tory core vote has now been marked out and things, at least, aren’t getting any worse.

Plus which, they kept their deposit, which isn’t bad going for the third horse in a two-horse race. Still, it’s the mark of a strong third party that their vote can hold up during a By-Election, and the last third party to achieve that in a Scottish Westminster By-Election was the SNP in Dunfermline & West Fife. The Tories worst days may be behind them (well, by ‘may be’ I mean ‘maybe’) but actual improvement? Not yet, I’m afraid. Once again, the party has done just enough to prevent humiliation. When does ‘just enough’ become not enough?

Liberal Democrats

What to say, other than “Ohhhh, dear…”? Do I even want to intrude upon private grief? Yep.

Let’s not forget that in 2003, the LibDems won control of Inverclyde Council. Eight years on, and they’ve now lost their deposit in Inverclyde. Against 2010, their vote share has fallen by 11.12%, worse than the fall they experienced in the apocalyptic result they received in May, and over fourteen months, they’ve lost more than four thousand voters. Indeed, in the past two months alone, they’ve managed to lose at least 1300. Two months ago, I said that the swings seen at the Holyrood election could happen again at Westminster and the LibDems would lose only three MPs. If the Inverclyde swings happened at a General Election, they would lose seven. Argyll & Bute – gone. Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross – gone. Edinburgh West – gone. West Aberdeenshire & Kincardine – gone. East Dunbartonshire, and the Scottish LibDems’ Deputy Leader Jo Swinson – gone. Gordon, and the President of the Scottish LibDems Malcolm Bruce – gone. Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander – gone.

So the troubles facing the LibDems are actually getting worse when we thought they couldn’t. And if the candidate, student Sophie Bridger (and how the hell can a university student be a LibDem candidate after their betrayal on tuition fees?!), was the ‘breath of fresh air’ that the party’s leaders proclaimed her to be, then boy oh boy, the rest of the party must be stale beyond belief.

The blame game has begun: Ross Finnie has blamed the Coalition, saying that voters simply can’t trust the LibDems ever again. Nick Clegg’s office has blamed the Scottish party for trying to tell voters that the Coalition is nothing to do with them, when the electorate knows better than that.

In a sense, they’re both right: the Coalition and its actions have hurt LibDem voters far harder than Tory supporters. The latter are, in the main, getting most of what they wanted, even if, in places, it’s been watered down. The former are, in the main, getting the opposite of what they wanted: a tuition fee rise their candidates pledged to vote against; a VAT increase that was made part of the “Tory VAT bombshell” on LibDem campaign posters; electoral reform killed off by a referendum on a system once dismissed by Nick Clegg as a “shabby little compromise”. So when Ross Finnie identifies the disappointment that former LibDem voters must feel, he has to be listened to. On the other hand, Nick Clegg’s people also have a point: they look to the Welsh party, that didn’t try and distance itself from the Coalition every time it was brought up, and whose decline in vote share two months ago was around half of that incurred by their Scottish counterparts (they only lost one AM: the Scottish LibDems lost 11 MSPs). Moreover, it’s impossible for Scottish LibDems to distance themselves from the Coalition when there are four Scottish LibDems in the Government: Lord Wallace, the Advocate General; Alastair Carmichael, the Deputy Chief Whip; Michael Moore, the Scotland Secretary; and last but by no means least, Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and one of the so-called ‘quad’ at the top of the Government – Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Scottish LibDems can’t distance themselves from the cuts when one of their own is running with the scissors.

Having said that, both Ross Finnie and the DPM’s mystery apologist are both wrong, in that they’re pegging this to the Coalition. The reality is that the party’s current difficulties go back further.

In Glasgow East (was that really three years ago?!), the LibDems came fourth, lost their deposit and their vote fell by 8.3%.

In Glenrothes four months later, the LibDems came fourth, lost their deposit and their vote fell by 10.1%.

In Glasgow North East a year on, the LibDems came sixth and lost their deposit. There was, luckily for them, no comparison against 2005 as they didn’t field a candidate then.

So Inverclyde is actually part of a three-year By-Election trend for the Scottish Liberal Democrats. You can’t blame the Coalition (or the Scottish party’s handling of it) for that. Also, let’s not forget that while England and Wales were tuning into Cleggmania last year, in Scotland, the LibDems were the only one of the Big 4 parties to see their vote fall. The Dunfermline & West Fife By-Election seems to have represented a zenith for the party and it’s been downhill all the way since then. The party will be hoping that this comes to represent the nadir, but right now, I’m not sure how, when or even if the decline will be arrested.

One other thing to consider: for them, the start of the campaign was hit by the untimely passing of their Deputy Director of Campaigns, Andrew Reeves. If it was possible to keep him down, I never found out how: he was occasionally shameless (and his blog would generate some fairly stormy posts from these quarters, particularly at election time) but he was indefatigable. Were he still around, doubtless on Friday morning he would have posted on his blog, hailing the hard work of activists, expressing his disappointment but defending his party and geeing his people up for the next campaign, wherever and whenever it might be. Frankly, he struck me as the sort of person that the LibDems will need now more than ever.

UKIP

It’s worth acknowledging that they had a candidate – as acknowledge him was all the media did. We keep assuming that for full-on, red-blooded, meat-eating Tories who are hacked off with the Coalition, UKIP is the natural destination for a protest vote. They must be few in number in Inverclyde as the party managed to lose a third of its support in 14 months. Granted, that only equated to the loss of 145 voters and a 0.13% drop in vote share, but still, that shows that the party which is looking for that protest vote didn’t find it at all here, and Marta Andreassen’s criticisms of the party’s failure to develop any credible forward momentum is, on this showing, correct.

Of course, when you realise just how unpopular the Conservatives are in Scotland, you also realise that a party trying to be more Tory than the Tories is pretty much destined to fall flat on its face north of the border. Still, after the good start afforded to them in the Barnsley Central result, UKIP’s 2011 has stalled: only nine Councillors in England, no AMs, no MLAs, and not even reaching 1% of the vote at Holyrood. This is supposed to be their golden opportunity, and they’re blowing it.

So in short: the SNP might have reason to feel a little disappointed but the general trend is still very positive; Labour can allow themselves a brief moment of relief but are far from being out of the woods yet; the Tories avoided disaster but will find very little to celebrate; UKIP have nothing to shout about at all; the LibDems do have plenty to shout about, but only shouts of distress.

So onto the next challenge – just ten months to go until the local elections…

FMQs

The new Presiding Officer, Tricia Marwick, has determined a formula by which the Labour Group Leader always gets Question 1, the Tory Leader gets Question 2 and is followed by an urgent constituency question, and a contrived process for Question 3 whereby Willie Rennie will ask it two weeks out of every three, and the third week will be given to what the PO judges to be the ‘best question’. I might have to start looking into how that works, but is this a good deal for Rennie?

On the face of it, no. The LibDems are a recognised group so Rennie is a recognised party leader – surely he should get a pop every week, as his predecessor did? John Swinney went from 33 SNP MSPs before dissolution in 2003 to 26 when the first FMQs after that election took place and saw no change in status; that had become a group of 25 by the 2007 dissolution but when Jack McConnell became Leader of the Opposition with 46 MSPs, he got the same deal, and Iain Gray gets the same deal again having gone into the election leading that group of 46 and now only leading a group of 37. Is it more about position than population?

Not quite. That 2003 Election, from which six recognised groupings and no fewer than four clear opposition parties emerged did have authorities wondering how to handle the Greens, with their seven MSPs, and the SSP, with their six. In the end, they alternated: the Greens would ask Question 3 one week; the SSP the next. Then the Independents formed a group and joined that rotation; following its implosion, the SSP ceased to be recognised as a group and lost its place. So at the point when there were only two parties in the pattern – one group of seven and one of six – the most frequent shot they managed was once a fortnight – 50% of the time. In a six-week cycle, these groups – both larger than the current LibDem group – would get three questions. Willie Rennie, with only five MSPs, gets four in that same cycle. Tricia Marwick has gone against the precedent and that’s worked in Rennie’s favour.

Verdict: Good deal

The Committees

Well, the Standing Orders have not been kind to the LibDems! Parliament has agreed the Committees and the LibDems go home empty handed, with no Convenerships and no Deputy Convenerships. Now, again, we go to our 2003 precedent, when the Greens and the SSP were given a shot at a Deputy Convenership. The Greens got Environment, and gleefully took it, with Eleanor Scott, then Mark Ruskell, then Eleanor Scott again taking the post. The SSP were allocated Subordinate Legislation, and refused to nominate anyone, so the post reverted to Labour. And that’s the key: in a gesture of magnanimity (well, dumping SubLeg on the SSP isn’t really a magnanimous act, but there you go), the Labour party gave away a couple of its Deputy slots. There was no entitlement, just an attempt by Labour to recognise the new reality. Then again, in 2007, the Greens got a whole Convenership with just two MSPs: they clearly broke the mechanism, but the reason is well known: they got one of the SNP’s Convenerships, and in exchange, voted for Alex Salmond for First Minister and his preferred Cabinet.

So the mechanism was bypassed on two occasions: once out of – and I choose this word for want of a better one – charity, and once from a deal. Now, there was no deal worth doing with the LibDems this time – they weren’t needed, and had nothing to offer in exchange for a Chair. Similarly, the difference between the 2003 results for the Greens and SSP was that theirs were breakthroughs – going from one to seven and one to six respectively. They had, for the first time, won their place, and were the next big thing. Conversely, the LibDems went from sixteen to five: not a breakthrough, but a breakdown. They were the big losers, yesterday’s people. Why show them anything, when they used to have it by right?

So you could say that the LibDems, while unlucky, got precisely what was coming to them, which is absolutely nothing, and it was sheer good fortune that gave the Greens their positions and would have given them to the SSP as well had they bothered to take it up.

But it might not be that simple. The SNP have eight Deputy Convenerships to Labour’s five, and one Tory completes the line-up. Had a clear proportional system been used, the Convenership allocations would be the same – nine SNP, four Labour, one Tory – but there would be only seven SNP and four Labour Deputies, with the Tories having two and one LibDem completing the line-up.

But that’s not what happened: the most authoritative ruling I can find on the matter is Rule 12.1.5 in the standing orders, which states that in proposing the Conveners and Deputies, “the Parliamentary Bureau shall have regard to the balance of political parties in the Parliament“. What does that even mean?!

It seems like the rules are sufficiently vague that they have enabled the shafting of the LibDems (and, indeed, the Tories): a Deputy Convenership might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it would be something to put under LibDem belts and they probably deserve one. But they haven’t got it, despite a vague Standing Order maybe saying that they ought to, and previous deals in the past serving as a precedent, and it’s a testament to both parties that they opted not to kick up a fuss in the Chamber. I’d be curious to know what went on in this week’s Bureau meeting to deliver this outcome, but no Minutes for Session 4 are up yet.

Verdict: Awful deal

The Corporate Body

This is the last of the key indicators, I suppose: it comes with some prestige and has enough importance that its Membership is one of the first things determined by the Parliament. And the LibDems do have one member, with their five MSPs; the SNP have one member, with their 68. It seems strange that when we talk about balance, a group with less than four per cent of the seats in the Chamber should take 25% of the posts on the Corporation, and that a party with more than half of all MSPs should also take only a quarter of the vacant slots.

But then, the SPCB has always been something of a cartel between the Big 4: every time, each party has nominated one – and only one candidate for the positions, and the only time there was a competitive vote was when Margo MacDonald attempted to break the consensus with the backing of the Greens, SSP and other Independents in 2003. Needless to say, she wasn’t successful. The parties opted to stick with the status quo, and this has worked in the LibDems’ favour. By a proportional mechanism, the SNP would have at least two members – three if d’Hondt had been used – Labour would have one under any calulation and the Tories would get one if someone did a straight calculation of dividing the strength of each group by 128 and multiplying by four, but nothing under d’Hondt. Whichever way you look at it, the refusal to abide by mathematics may have deprived the LibDems of a Deputy Committee Convener, but it’s the reason they’re still on the SPCB.

Verdict: Good deal

So all in all, the LibDems haven’t done too badly: the election result meant they just hung onto Bureau representation; they kept their place on the Corporation and they managed to secure a better FMQs deal than leaders of larger groups got in the past. It’s only on the Committees that they’ve been shafted, and even then, what they’ve lost out on isn’t that big in the grand scheme of things. Things could be a lot better for them, but then, they haven’t been left behind completely, so they could be far, far worse as well.

As was noted even in those difficult looking polls, the SNP vote still looked like it was going to increase regardless of whether or not Labour managed to overtake it (even that isn’t easy for an incumbent government), so for the vote to shoot up as high as it did was nothing short of stunning, and so it was that Alex Salmond became the first Holyrood leader to cross that elusive finish line of 65 seats, as well as the first MSP to be elected First Minister at the start of two Parliaments.

So how did it happen? Clearly, Labour’s poor campaign and the LibDem implosion helped, but something pulled disaffected voters towards the SNP, rather than just putting them off voting altogether (though as usual, many were put off from voting altogether), and the SNP mantra, “Record, Team, Vision” was the key: as the Government, they had a record to defend, and they set about defending it (as evidenced in the What has the Scottish Government ever done for us? PPB), in stark contrast to the Labour campaigns of 2003 and 2007, where instead of celebrating free public transport for senior citizens, free personal care, the deferment of tuition fees and the smoking ban, the Labour mantras were Then What? and Break Up Britain, End Up Broke respectively. And the ‘Team’ helped: much was said about the promotion of Alex Salmond, and the campaign to re-elect him as First Minister, the ‘personality contest’ extended far beyond the Salmond/Gray angle as SNP supporters invited voters to compare the respective merits of Nicola Sturgeon with Jackie Baillie; Kenny MacAskill with Richard Baker; Mike Russell with Des McNulty; John Swinney with Andy Kerr, so it’s no surprise that all of them were re-appointed to the Cabinet, which saw new faces brought in through its expansion from six to nine (though I wonder if Adam Ingram, the former Children’s Minister who now finds himself on the back benches, is as royally pissed off as I would be, to be the only member of the Government not to get re-appointed).

And the vision? Well, it’s notable that in difficult times, people opted for the most optimistic message rather than the negative one. When did a Government last do that? In 2010, Gordon Brown invited voters to “take a fresh look at Labour, then take a long, hard look at the Tories”; in 2007, Jack McConnell mused that he used to believe in independence, but also used to believe in Santa Claus; in 2005, Labour released a poster of Michael Howard’s face superimposed on a flying pig; in 2003, the campaign depicted Scotland literally breaking apart from the rest of Britain and swinging about aimlessly; in 2001, a morphed face of William Hague and Margaret Thatcher was Labour’s way of warning us to “Get out and vote, or they get in”. And the Tories were no better: in 1997 they depicted Tony Blair as Helmut Kohl’s ventriloquist dummy, and in 1992 they warned of “Labour’s Tax Bombshell” and in 1987 depicted Labour’s policy on arms as a soldier surrendering, and also released a campaign criticising the Alliance (while having the gall to describe voting Conservative as “the positive direction”!). I could go on, but you see the point: Governments don’t usually campaign positively… this one did, and won.

So what now? Clearly, the By-Election win in Aberdeen, making the SNP the largest party there is evidence that momentum is at least with the party, but the next immediate test will be the Inverclyde By-Election. Now, under normal circumstances, expectations should be low – it’s a Westminster By-Election and Greenock & Inverclyde was one of the few seats not to succumb to the SNP landslide at Holyrood. And yet, and yet. Momentum is indeed with the SNP, just as it was in Glasgow East, where the party was similarly written off. Could another shock be on the cards? With the right candidate (and I know who I would want the candidate to be), it’s not impossible. Difficult, but not impossible.

But the next nationwide test comes next year, with the local elections. These will have a new significance: the first stand-alone local elections in Scotland since 1995. At the moment, levels of morale and momentum are such that Labour figures are worrying that they may even lose Glasgow, one of the few councils to maintain a majority-controlled council after the introduction of PR (sound familiar?).

And there’s the referendum – whenever it will be held. Again, the odds look difficult for a ‘Yes’ victory, but had anyone forecast this election result just three months ago would have been carried out of the room. Even three years ago, when SNP tails really were up, no one would have believed it possible. Three years from now? Anything is possible.

So the big question is, is this the SNP’s peak? Its plateau? Or just another stopping point on the treacherous path to the ultimate goal, the SNP’s own Mount Olympus – independence?

That will, of course, depend on the SNP’s performance – opposition leaders, have tried to claim some sort of victory in the result by saying that the SNP no longer have any excuses for not delivering on its promises. I’m sure Alex Salmond is already kicking himself at having been so easily lulled into a true sense of security. Nevertheless, it is true that the SNP no longer has any Parliamentary obstacle to its programme, and is constrained only in the Budget available to the Government and the powers afforded to the Parliament.

So I’d say that the Government will probably be re-elected in 2016: the sheer strength of its position now makes it very difficult to unseat, but the margin of victory will depend on lots of other factors. Obviously, how much it’s lived up to expectations will be the first factor, but also what state the opposition (particularly Labour) are in, voters’ opinions of Alex Salmond at the time, and the set of policies up for debate by then.

That’s the bizarre thing: the SNP face the most immediate certainties: the party has won, and won outright, and so is in control (theoretically, at least) of the Scottish political agenda for the next five years; but in the long term, it has the most variables. Can it carry forward this performance to Council chambers up and down the country? Can the Government deliver? Can an independence referendum be won? Can the opposition remain so weak? Can Alex Salmond retain his political mojo for five more years? Can the first place in the last European Election be retained in 2014? Can there finally be a breakthrough at Westminster?

So many questions – but I’m looking forward to finding out the answers.

PS I missed a discussion on Twitter the other night about the continuation of the Sunday Whip or otherwise, and I couldn’t help but smile at the tongue-in-cheek comment that a weekly post of “the SNP won the vote” would be considerably less interesting than what the last four years brought. Given how much of a knife-edge things were on for most of that time, a record of how the parties (and individuals) behaved at Decision Time was. I felt, a useful feature and I’m not sure that it would be as useful this time around: party alliances mean less, an MSP can press the wrong button, get stuck in a lift or wage a personal hate campaign against his or her own party leader and it won’t be all that significant anymore. I’m tossing around a few ideas of what (if anything) should follow the Whip, and something will emerge, I’m sure. Maybe a focus on one debate, or Question Time, or Committees, or legislation, or even Members’ Debates. Perhaps even casting the net wider? I have a few options and something will doubtless come to me at the weekend, especially now I’ll have less football to distract me.

It was a formality, surely? A million Scots voted for Labour in the Westminster election; the party regained Glasgow East and Dunfermline & West Fife, lost in By-Elections to the SNP and LibDems respectively and retained every other seat. Momentum remained with Labour beyond Christmas: the party enjoyed double-digit poll leads and maybe, just maybe, a Labour majority was possible.

Instead, they went from 46 MSPs (and 44 notional seats) to 37. Compare and contrast with Wales, where Labour – leading the Welsh Government since 1999 – gained four seats; compare and contrast with England, where Labour – rejected by the electorate in 2010 – ended up with 857 more Councillors and in control of 26 more Councils. Yet Labour had pinned its hopes on the one part of the UK where the party actually ended up going backwards,

Now, of course, Labour sources on the night said it was all to do with the LibDem collapse, and the Labour vote held up. Wrong on both counts: on both votes, the increase in the SNP’s vote was greater than the fall in LibDem vote share, and on the Regional vote, the SNP increase was more than double the LibDem decrease. And the Labour vote actually fell: by 0.5% on the Constituency vote, and by 2.9% on the Regional.

So what went wrong? Everyone seems to point to the Subway Incident, when Iain Gray fled from a group of anti-cuts protesters (whose position he was meant to agree with, remember). Others point to the first TV debate, when Gray ended up in a shouting match with a member of the audience. It’s also tempting to point to the policy U-turns, which effectively turned the Labour manifesto into a bootleg of the SNP edition: only with weaker commitments and some howling mistakes, and so reduced the election into a personality contest which Gray couldn’t win.

But with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, it seems that the seeds were sown for the 2011 defeat in the 2010 performance.

In 2010, all Scottish Labour had to offer was horror stories about the Tories, and a promise (broken by a combination of the parliamentary arithmetic and the refusal of Scottish Labour MPs to remain in government if it meant dealing constructively with the SNP) that they – and only they – could stop them. Well, why change a winning formula, eh?

So a year later, it was perhaps inevitable that the Labour manifesto would begin with the words “Now that the Tories are back…”

And this was the problem: it wasn’t just slagging off the Tories that delivered success in 2010… it was being able to frame the election as a Labour v. Tory contest, a LibDem constituency bar chart writ large. It was not possible to frame the 2011 election as the same: in this election, Labour were the opposition to the SNP, and not the Tories. And so, ten days before polling day, and a few months too late, Labour junked their campaign strategy, stopped talking about “what really mattered” (they said this was jobs, but spent the time talking about the Tories instead) and started ranting about independence.

But the problem with negative campaigning is that you can only tap into fears if people are actually afraid: there’s no question that many people – not just in Scotland – were hugely sceptical about what a Tory Government would mean for them. But this year, there was never any prospect of a Tory Government, so whipping up anti-Tory sentiment was never going to work. And it was no good attacking the SNP: they’d been in office for four years already and the sky had not fallen in. Even fears about independence wouldn’t work: that was farmed out to a referendum which could be won or lost separately.

Now, it’s perfectly possible that Labour may have had some distinct, positive policies – but we never heard them! All we heard was the aping of SNP vote-winners, which had been funded in budgets with Tory support… coupled with attacks on the SNP and the Tories, the two parties that had proposed, supported and enacted those popular moves such as the Council Tax freeze.

Nor was Ed Miliband’s intervention useful. This, we were told, was Labour’s first step back to Downing Street. Nothing to do with, you know, the future of Scotland. Nothing to do with, you know, who would form the Scottish Government. No, this was, apparently, all to do with an election four years down the line. Miliband greatly misread the electorate’s attitude to the election and the Parliament, just as Jack McConnell did in 2007 when he described his own contest for re-election as a ‘mid-term’ poll.

So again with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, Labour’s reverse was inevitable: no policies, no strategy, no hope… for the voters or the candidates!

And now, the recriminations begin: the MPs say they should have been involved more; MSPs point to MPs such as Jim Sheridan, whose level of interest was such that he took a holiday during the campaign. MSPs (and former MSPs) want more autonomy; MPs say Westminster can’t be shut out. It’s now the job of Jim Murphy and Sarah Boyack to piece together what went wrong and how they fix it (a Labour equivalent of the Tories’ Sanderson Review last year) and it’s clear that what ever they propose, one set of Parliamentarians will be royally pissed off. Moreover, Jack McConnell has realised that Labour MPs will have a greater say in the Leader of Labour MSPs than the MSPs themselves will: the parliamentarians – in Holyrood, Westminster and Europe – form one section of the electoral college to elect Iain Gray’s successor, and there are 42 MPs to 37 MSPs (and 2 MEPs).

Meanwhile, whatever the review concludes, and whatever lessons can be learned, the early signs are that Labour will not learn them. This week, following the formal re-election of Alex Salmond as First Minister, we had an announcement of the new Cabinet and Ministers. The Cabinet has increased from six members to nine.

Today, we see the appointment of Iain Gray’s (caretaker) Shadow Cabinet. Now, I’ve been saying for years that the Labour front bench was just too large – there were 24 Labour frontbenchers to 16 in the SNP before the election. We’ve got an expanded SNP cabinet, and a reduced Labour group shorn of a number of front bench members such as Andy Kerr, Des McNulty and David Whitton. Despite that, the Shadow Cabinet is still larger than the actual Cabinet! Eleven MSPs to the SNP’s nine. Now, you can forgive the presence of John Park, the new Chief Whip (incidentally, why has David Stewart lost that position while Richard Baker, the party’s hapless Justice spokesman, got a promotion to the Finance brief?), but you have Michael McMahon in situ as Shadow Local Government Secretary, when his Government counterpart will be new junior Minister for Local Government and Planning, Aileen Campbell. Equally, it’s interesting that there’s still a Local Government portfolio, when Housing, once a Labour ‘priority’ is clearly deemed as no longer meritorious of having a direct spokesperson in the Shadow Cabinet and a Deputy Spokesperson as well. Labour Councillors have a voice on their front bench; people struggling to get on the property ladder do not.

So the early signs for Scottish Labour are bad. But what about Labour at the UK level?

Well, this may yet still be a staging post: Gray was outflanked by all three other participants in the TV debates and something similar will happen to Ed Miliband if he is still in post in 2015, while the strategic errors made by Scottish Labour throughout their first term of opposition will provide profound lessons for Labour MPs if they are willing to learn them.

And the key lesson? Beating people with the Tory stick won’t work. Despite the so-called Cameron effect, the Tory vote hasn’t improved all that much since Michael Howard assumed the Leadership, so attacking the ‘ideological’ nature of the cuts won’t have any effect: the people voting for the Tories now have been, in the main, voting for even more ideologically-driven cuts for years. They’re getting something of what they wanted, and it’s telling that the Tories ended up with more Councillors and AMs (though fewer MSPs) after polling day. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that Labour’s best performances were in Northern England, which has become a largely Labour-LibDem battleground.

But there’s an even bigger warning shot to Labour: simply throwing pelters at Nick Clegg won’t work either. The reason they did so well in Northern England is that there was, in the main, no credible challenger to Labour for disaffected LibDem votes. In Scotland, while Iain Gray was bleating about the Tories, the SNP took ads out in major newspapers listing reasons for LibDem supporters to vote SNP. In Brighton & Hove for example, the Greens went from joint second with Labour to clear first place, with 23 Councillors. They made a net England-wide gain on the night (though their net gain of 14 was accounted for primarily by the increase of ten in Brighton, and the party did go into retreat in Lancaster, the Greens’ key stronghold in the North West). Now in Brighton, there wasn’t much of a LibDem presence there to begin with, but the Greens were the ones who took on the Coalition parties and won there, just as the SNP did in Scotland. The lesson to Miliband is this: attacking the Tories won’t work yet – their supporters are getting what they wanted – while just not being Nick Clegg isn’t enough – Alex Salmond and Caroline Lucas aren’t Nick Clegg either.

We know what Labour isn’t, but until Labour itself has worked out what it is, it will remain in Opposition. That is the bottom line.

Still, it may be a little galling for the remaining MSPs (discounting Tavish Scott, of course): Jim Hume, Liam McArthur and Alison McInnes, who are all only embarking on their second term in the Parliament but have served for four years more than their new Leader. Nevertheless, he was the best choice for now. As the hero of the Dunfermline & West Fife By-Election, he occupies a place in the Scottish LibDem firmament broadly equivalent to the status enjoyed by Winnie Ewing in the SNP. Given the almost mindbending severity of the punishment meted out to his party a fortnight ago, he will be uniquely placed to rally the remaining faithful and get them to dust themselves off and get ready again. The first election he’ll see as Leader will be the Inverclyde By-Election (yet to be called) to replace the late David Cairns. The LibDems came third here with just 13.3% of the vote so judging by recent performances it’ll be a morale booster if the LibDems either hold onto third or retain their deposit, and it’ll be a total miracle if they can do both. The first real, nationwide test will come in next year’s local elections where the LibDems are defending 166 Councillors, 12.7% of the vote and Leadership of Edinburgh and Aberdeen Councils. If the party can hold on to half that vote, and 50-60 Councillors, then he’ll have passed the first test: not making an advance, not stopping the rot, but at least slowing the decline.

That said, not all the omens are good for Willie Rennie: at a time when LibDem participation in the Coalition is not popular in Scotland, the last person people may want to hear from is a former Special Adviser to the Coalition’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Moore. And Labour’s experiences of promoting former Special Advisers to the Secretary of State for Scotland, Wendy Alexander (who worked for Donald Dewar) and Iain Gray (who worked for Alistair Darling) did not end in success. Rennie’s pedigree may work against him, as may this comment:

I will be working with my colleagues in the Scottish Parliament to stand up to the SNP bulldozer.

Now, obviously, everyone’s working out how to deal with the return of majority government, but firstly, it’s a little rich to hear objections from the party that formed a majority Coalition bulldozer with Labour at Holyrood from 1999 to 2007, and now is in a majority Coalition bulldozer with the Tories at Westminster. And secondly, the naked hostility shown to the SNP by the LibDem Leadership over the past few years has done the party no favours whatsoever. Perhaps, just perhaps, the LibDems ought to take a more conciliatory line. After all, even if the LibDems had played nicely for the last four years, there’s no guarantee that they’d have secured much beyond the occasional Budget concession – the flagship policy of Local Income Tax would only have enjoyed the support of 63, maybe 64 MSPs even if the SNP and LibDems could have worked out the details – while playing hardball could yield results if the LibDems could get the other parties on board.

This time, sitting there throwing a wobbly at everything done or said by the SNP will get them nowhere: they’re still the third largest opposition group and with a much reduced contingent (if Willie Rennie gets a weekly FMQs spot he’ll be getting treated better than the Green or SSP Leaders did in the 2003-07 Parliament when they each had more MSPs than he does now) and so a far smaller platform. If they actually try talking with the SNP rather than shouting at them, or taking the huff at any idea simply because it was had by Alex Salmond. Think about that – a group of just five MSPs actually getting concessions from a majority government!

It could happen, and it could be the LibDems’ easiest ticket to restored credibility… if Willie Rennie has the balls to try it.

Sadly, his little announcement today suggests that he might not. We shall see.

And yet. When the boundary changes were factored in, the Tories may have had 17 MSPs – two of which were retiring – but were defending 19 seats. In effect, they lost 21% of their group, compared with Labour losing 16% (the LibDem loss goes up to 71%). This was the first devolved election of the 21st Century where Tory support fell on both votes. The loss of Edinburgh Pentlands to the SNP was calamitous for the Tories, even if David McLetchie managed to re-enter Holyrood via the Regional List. The failure to capitalise on favourable boundary changes and pick up that third seat in the North East was an embarrassment, though not quite as severe as the failure to defend the third seat they already had in Mid Scotland & Fife. The failure to secure those notional constituency wins in Eastwood and (if you believe David Denver) Dumfriesshire was grim, though by far and away the result which will really bruise the Tories was the loss of their South Scotland Regional seat, and its occupant until 5 May, Derek Brownlee. Brownlee had been one of the Tories’ best assets as Finance Spokesman, but ended up dumped in East Lothian fighting an uphill struggle. And there’s also a wider symbolism that the Tories no longer hold list seats in every region. Ironically, until 5 May, everyone in Scotland had a Tory MSP. For the first time since 1999, there are gaps: the six non-Tory constituencies in the South.

So, right from the get-go, this was more of a blow for Annabel Goldie than has been portrayed. But then, look at her form: in the 2007 election, her first electoral test, the Tories flatlined in the Constituency vote and lost 1.6% in the Regional, losing one seat overall. In the 2009 European election, the Tory vote fell by 0.9%, and the Tories lost a seat. Of course, there were only six seats available (compared with seven in 2004), but even if there had been no change in Scotland’s seat allocation, the Tories would still have lost their seat, to the SNP. In the 2010 election, the Tory vote increased by 0.9%, but that resulted in no gains for the Scottish Tories. So a fall of 2.7% in the Constituency vote, and 1.6% in the Regional vote was Annabel Goldie’s worst result as Leader.

Then, it’s worth comparing that result with England and Wales. In Wales, the Tories lost their Leader, Nick Bourne, but gained two seats overall, overtaking Plaid to become the second largest party in the Welsh Assembly. In England, predictions of electoral doom for the Tories were way off the mark: the Tories ended up with 85 more Councillors, and in control of four more Councils than before.

Now, the Coalition is (and always has been) markedly less popular in Scotland than in England or Wales: the Tories won a majority of English seats in 2010 and the two Coalition parties enjoyed 64% of the vote between them in England; in Wales, Labour may have come first in votes and seats, but the Tories and LibDems combined out-polled them by ten percentage points; but in Scotland, combined LibDem and Tory support still fell way short of Labour’s total poll. Maybe, just maybe, you could blame the Coalition.

Or maybe not: after all, the Tories sub-par electoral performances since, well, 1987 onwards showed that the Scottish Tories still haven’t quite recovered from Margaret Thatcher, and that hostility to her and her party still carries through today (which explains why Labour won in Scotland in 2010, running a campaign that focused exclusively on the Tories). Since then, what’s been left is a Tory rump that, in the main, is broadly in favour of what the Coalition is doing. That explains why the Tory vote held up in England and Wales: Tory voters are getting more or less what they voted for (unlike LibDem voters, who appear to be getting more or less the opposite of what they voted for), so attitudes to the Coalition can’t fully explain why the Tories did so poorly, and uniquely poorly, in Scotland.

Yet perversely, Annabel Goldie was their trump card: she communicated with the electorate in a way that no other Scottish Tory could, and was generally agreed to be “the only Tory it’s okay to like”. So while she was seen as a caretaker leader in many circles – despite remaining in position for five and a half years, and outlasting two Labour Leaders (and maybe even now, a third) and two LibDem Leaders – it’s clear that she wasn’t the problem: the party itself has been in a state of almost institutionalised doldrums for years… hence the review of the party that took place after the Scottish Conservatives again uniquely failed to make any major advance in Scotland last year. And as none of the proposed changes could be enacted in time for this election, that what held in the Sanderson review still holds and what caused the party’s inertia in 2010 helped to cause the party’s reverse in 2011.

That said, Goldie did not make things easy: though her directness and blunt honesty about what would be required in the coming months and years won her respect (though, obviously, not acclaim), her threats to have the First Minister “by the short and curlies” perhaps backfired: from being the party of “principled opposition” and constructive engagement last time, they went to being the firewall, the right-wing (against Labour) and Unionist (against the SNP) awkward squad. In many ways, the combination of “swallow your medicine” and “the other parties are tosspots” made the Tory campaign the most negative of all. They pitched it wrong, and it was that that shifted the party from neutral into reverse gear.

So what happens now? The Sanderson proposals will start to take shape (or not) and the Scottish Tories will have a new leader with clear authority over the whole Scottish party by the end of the year. This leader may not necessarily be an MSP – and given the ever decreasing pool of Tory MSPs (many of whom aren’t viewed in a credible light and it’s telling that John Lamont, the Chinless Wonder is supposed to be seriously considering a bid for the top spot) – it wouldn’t hurt to cast their net a little wider. The problem is, they have only one Scottish MP (who isn’t exactly a stellar performer) and there’s no real Boris Johnson figure among Tory Councillors: they lead only two Councils – a minority administration in South Ayrshire and a minority Coalition with the LibDems in Dumfries & Galloway – so unless Malcolm Rifkind returns from his constituency in Kensington, or Michael Forsyth returns from the Lords, it’s an MSP or Struan Stevenson, who will be 68 at the time of the next Scottish election. In other words, it’s an MSP.

And the choice won’t be great: the early front-runners are current Deputy Leader Murdo Fraser, seen as a Thatcherite, and Jackson Carlaw, a junior frontbencher who is seen as making Thatcher look like Barbara Castle. The main difference between the two is on the constitution, where Fraser has mused openly in favour of broader financial powers for the Scottish Parliament, while Carlaw has mused openly on what the point of MSPs actually is. While David Cameron made the UK Tories electable by a combination of shifting himself towards the centre and (on some issues) shifting the centre towards himself, the far more vertical struggle of making the Scottish Tories credible will appear to be in the hands of someone who will head even further out to the right.

So with David Cameron not really having an effect in Scotland (all those elections took place under his bailiwick as well as Goldie’s), and with Scottish Conservative policy about to tack heavily to the right, the Scottish Tories’ only hope in the 2012 Council elections, 2014 European elections, 2015 Westminster elections and 2016 Holyrood elections will be Goldie’s saving grace: the personality of their Leader – if he (it’s most likely to be a he) has one. And if the Scottish electorate takes to it.

I said that while the LibDems did terribly, it’s not wise to write them off in the long term. The Tories didn’t do anywhere near as badly but they’re the ones with the biggest uncertainty for the future.

Of course, it was the Coalition. Nick Clegg cosying up to the hated Tories, a betrayal of everything the LibDems stood for when the LibDem candidates’ pledge to oppose any increase tuition fees morphed into a LibDem Secretary of State proposing to treble them. The Coalition killed the Scottish LibDems.

Except that’s not the whole story. Firstly, attempts to distance the Tavish Scott and the Scottish LibDems (now, of course, the Norwegian LibDems) fall flat when you realise that Scott was not “Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament”, as Iain Gray was, but Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. All of them – activist, Councillor, MSP, MEP and MP. He is, therefore, just as much the leader of Jim Wallace (Advocate General), Alastair Carmichael (Government Deputy Chief Whip), Michael Moore (Secretary of State for Scotland) and Danny Alexander (Chief Secretary to the Treasury) as Nick Clegg is. The Coalition is making cut after cut, and it’s a Scottish Liberal Democrat who’s running with the scissors.

But leaving aside the Coalition, the LibDems were on an upward curve eight years ago: gaining a constituency against Labour and holding firm overall while Labour lost seats, strengthening their hand in the Coalition Executive. Moving to second place in votes and seats in 2005. The Dunfermline & West Fife By-Election victory. Even a 10% increase in the LibDem vote in the Moray By-Election a few months later. Things got a little shakier in 2007, though: the Constituency vote went up but the Regional vote went down, the LibDems lost three constituencies and one seat overall.

Then after Nicol Stephen’s resignation came Glasgow East, and the lost deposit there. It was like that game on The Price is Right with the little climber that goes up and up and up only to plummet off the edge of the mountain if it goes too far.

And under Tavish Scott’s leadership, things got worse: Glasgow East was followed by Glenrothes, where the party again lost its deposit, then came the 2009 European election where the LibDem vote went down and the party ended up considering itself fortunate to have got George Lyon elected. This was followed by another lost deposit in Glasgow North East, and a 2010 Westminster election where Scotland was the only part of the UK where the LibDem vote fell (though bizarrely, they held all their seats).

So a decline was always on the cards: the seat in Central Scotland was always in jeopardy. A series of heavy swings against the party in the Highlands and North East in 2007 (and repeated in 2010) made Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch a marginal, especially with John Farquhar Munro’s retirement, and Jamie Stone’s decision to stand down – coupled with the SNP selecting a sitting Regional MSP as their candidate – brought Caithness, Sutherland and Ross into play, though they might have expected one Regional seat in recompense. Meanwhile, Edinburgh Central had been brought into the LibDem column through boundary changes and academic projections so was always vulnerable, and after Dunfermline & West Fife reverted to Labour in 2010, the LibDems’ loss of Dunfermline at Holyrood was a racing certainty, though again, a List seat should have come as compensation. Aberdeen South & North Kincardine was expecially vulnerable when Nicol Stephen announced his retirement (especially with SNP Regional MSP Maureen Watt active in the area) and a second List seat there was far from set in stone. Jeremy Purvis had effectively been drawn out of Parliament by the Boundary Commissioners and again, the compensatory List seat wasn’t a racing certainty. So the best the LibDems could probably have expected was a loss of four seats, to 13.

So, there was the Coalition and a general trend against the LibDems anyway. What stuck the boot in?

The campaign, I’m afraid.

What was the LibDems’ Big Idea? Keeping police forces the same. Now, aside from the logical insanity of this – if Strathclyde, with it’s area greater than Denmark and mix of central Glasgow and rural spots like the Isle of Arran, works as a police force, then a national force can work, while if a national force can’t work then the existing eight forces are a basket case – it means that the LibDems’ Big Idea was the status quo. Oh dear.

Then was the panicked hostility to independence, roughly timed alongside the Labour shift to the same theme. Again, the LibDem theme was the status quo. They’re supposed to be Liberal, but all they had to offer was keeping things as they are. Add to that Tavish Scott’s continued ratty, defensive performance coupled with flying off the handle at reporters who dared to mention Nick Clegg and you have the perfect storm: an unpopular party at the Federal level; a party in retreat in Scotland anyway, a poor policy slate and a Leader rattled. Any one of them could have caused a drop. All of them together caused a collapse.

So what now? Tavish Scott was more of a liability than the LibDems were prepared to admit so while there’s a question of who else was left, this was probably a good thing. Liam McArthur and Willie Rennie are the favourites: McArthur was Jim Wallace’s advisor before succeeding him in 2007, so has the experience but might not set the heather alight; Rennie was the victor of Dunfermline & West Fife but became a SpAd to Michael Moore after the election, so he’s a totemic figure in LibDem circles and will be a real motivator, but being a SpAd after losing your seat didn’t work out too well for Iain Gray, and there’s a proximity to the Coalition issue there.

But in the immediate future, there’s the matter of the group reducing to five: should they lose one somehow, they cease to be a recognised Group in the Parliament, and would have to coalesce with the Greens and Margo. Which is why the idea of Tavish Scott going for the Presiding Officer’s job was just plain barking.

Factor in the AV defeat: the Tories’ end point in the Coalition negotiations was Labour’s starting point and so we got saddled with a proposition that no one was enthusiastic about but had to support enthusiastically. Equally, the No campaign’s biggest asset was that the LibDems were in favour. And the local election wipeout in England.

So what’s the answer? Withdrawal from the Coalition?

But it’s not that easy: walking out now would only push the party further towards oblivion. Having been derided as unprincipled charlatans for signing up to the Coalition, and going back on everything they stood for in the process, walking out now on the back of poor election results would serve only to cast them as cowards trying to run away from a mess of their own making. So now they have to stick with a Coalition, and further impotent hissy fits from Chris Huhne, who is incapable of dealing with the reality-bending Sayeeda Warsi (the way you deal with her is you ignore her: I’m convinced that she is merely a figment of the country’s collective imagination, and if you pretend she’s not there she will cease to exist). Worse still, Nick Clegg’s attempt to wade into the NHS reforms could backfire. He could end up making the LibDems even more unpopular by appearing to sanction the uundermining of the National Health Service in England, even if he succeeds in watering the proposals down. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t… but if he holds on, there might, maybe, somehow, be a recovery. But not for a while.

And what do the MSPs do? They’re just in the Bureau, it remains to be seen what FMQ allocation they’ll get: the Greens and SSP could only get a slot every other week with more MSPs than the LibDems now have. They’ll need to find a better way of dealing with the Coalition than just simply flying off the handle and moaning about Nick Clegg. And they’ll need other policies besides the status quo.

Yet all might not be lost: they might not have the balance of power or even enough seats to merit more than a token acknowledgement at Holyrood, but they still have eleven Scottish LibDem MPs at Westminster, including one in Dover House, who had better increase his visibility if he knows what’s good for him (actually, if I were Nick Clegg, I’d sack Michael Moore, who has attained Des Browne levels of inefficacy, and promote Alastair Carmichael), so they’re still very relevant to the Scottish political landscape, if not to the Scottish Parliament. And were the swings we saw last week to be repeated, they would still have eight MPs: only Alan Reid, Malcolm Bruce and Jo Swinson would be lost. So even a repeat of the 2011 catastrophe in 2015 might not be so catastrophic.

But there are two factors outwith the control of Tavish Scott’s successor that will determine that. Firstly, whether and when the locus of political debate in Scotland will shift from Holyrood to Westminster. The later the shift takes place, the harder it will be for them to appear relevant. And the second is how much worse things will get before they get better.

Right now, all the LibDems can sit, wait and hope.