The Scottish National Party has not lost a national election since 2010.
Indeed, its dominance has been such that it even retained a majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in 2017, when it actually polled badly: not one of their MPs topped 40 per cent of the vote.
Yet, after more than thirteen years of continuous triumph – at no point marked, alas, by seemly humility – all the signs are that the Nats next week will drink the dregs of defeat.
Labour have overhauled them in the polls, in quite a few divisions tactical voting will come to the succour of the odd Lib Dem and even the beleaguered Scottish Tories – and desperate SNP efforts to cling on are complicated by sweeping boundary changes.
Drew Hendry, for instance – these last nine years MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey – now contests an enormous new division: Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire. Untold, bewildered electors in Portree, Lochalsh and Brae Lochaber now stare at his leaflets and think, ‘Drew who?’
Stephen Flynn has the best hope of holding onto his seat, and if SNP fair badly next week his success may not bode well for John Swinney
And, here in the Western Isles, all the signs are that it is a straight fight between incumbent Angus MacNeil (now running as an Independent) and Labour’s Torcuil Crichton.
In the very first seat the Nationalists won in a General Election, and amidst an SNP campaign so shambolic furious voters have found themselves fined a fiver for receiving unstamped election addresses, they are out of contention.
It’s hardly scientific, but on a run across Lewis yesterday one counted 25 posters for Angus MacNeil and just five for the Nationalists.
Fundamentally, and all across the land, it is a problem of electoral arithmetic.
Support for the SNP is broadly spread. Votes for their opponents tend to be usefully concentrated – the Tories across the ‘Blue Wall’ of the Southern Uplands, the Liberal Democrats in certain fastnesses like Edinburgh West, NE Fife and the Northern Isles, and renascent Labour in the Central Belt.
The margins are so fine that, should they secure about 35 per cent of the poll, the Nats might hope for 20 seats out of 57.
Should they be squeezed down to 30 per cent, their surviving MPs would probably be in single figures.
Still worse, psychologically, they may well lose all they hold in Scotland’s cities – the formidable Stephen Flynn, in Aberdeen South and the party’s Westminster leader, having the best hope of survival.
His party is on course otherwise for urban obliteration and, by the perverse values of our lounge-lizard commentariat, can then readily be dismissed as the Members for Teuchterville.
Had he carried himself more wisely, retread-leader John Swinney would probably win the benefit of the doubt.
The dissolution of Parliament was sprung on him weeks after he first sat at the Bute House desk, the Nationalists are desperately short of money, and his predecessors as First Minister left an appalling mess.
Humza Yousaf proved an amiable dud; Nicola Sturgeon spent far too much of her time and energies angling for her next job and not nearly enough fixing the public services that actually matter to hardworking Scots and their families.
That’s before we even touch on Operation Branchform and those Nationalists currently helping the police with their inquiries.
But John Swinney has not, carried himself wisely. Inexplicably, at the start of this campaign he blew untold political capital in absurd defence of the disgraced ex-Health Minister, Michael Matheson, who had tried to milk the taxpayer for an enormous sum of money after his kids racked up an eye-watering bill, overseas, on his official iPad.
As his excuses disintegrated, the Falkirk West MSP was at every turn less than candid and a serious leader would have thrown him overboard.
Then, late in May, and as if determined to douse himself in petrol and strike a match, Swinney piled improbable praise on Nicola Sturgeon.
An ‘incredibly dynamic individual who led Scotland through really, really difficult times,’ he enthused. An ‘asset’ who is most ‘welcome on the campaign trail’.
This is a courageous take on a woman w hose leadership disintegrated in a farce of pronouns, whose husband has been charged with embezzlement of SNP funds – Peter Murrell denies any wrongdoing – and who, since her fall, has been an infrequent presence in Holyrood.
Sturgeon has declined a seat on any committee and spoken but thrice in the chamber since her resignation – not once on a constituency matter, though Glasgow Southside is one of the poorest in Scotland.
And then there is the entire incoherence of the chosen Swinney election strategy.
He has defiantly made independence ‘page one, line one’ just as we are all utterly weary of constitutional psychodrama.
While there is still widespread support for Scotland some day in the dim and distant taking charge of its own affairs, for few Yessers is it more now than a vague, quasi-theological aspiration.
And, when the urgent and alarming electoral threat to the Nats is Scottish Labour, the SNP leader has inexplicably targeted his party’s guns on the Scottish Tories.
That Sturgeon has an unfortunate past is bad enough. But so, for Nationalists long in the tooth, has John Swinney.
Swinney, who joined the SNP as a 15-year-old in the wake of its 1979 rout – no one, as he has often joked, could accuse him of scheming ambition – shot swiftly up its ranks partly because he was amiable and a grafter, but largely because there was scarcely any competition from his own generation.
He was made SNP National Secretary at 22, became an MP – at his second attempt – in 1997, and won the party leadership when Alex Salmond stood down in 2000.
Swinney is modest, unassuming and kindly. Alas, he has the charisma of a gerbil. Like Reform’s Richard Tice, or sometime Scottish Lib Dem leader Nicol Stephen, he has no television presence, no air of danger, and not the least ‘cut-through.’
There’s a delicious Yiddish word for this: ‘nebbish’. Someone who, when he enters the room, makes you feel someone has just left it.
Accordingly, he lurched from one electoral disaster to the next.
The Nationalists threw away one of their scant Westminster seats in 2001 and came within 50 votes of losing another.
At the 2003 Scottish parliament elections, they shed a quarter of their seats.
Colleagues quietly gave him a year. And, when there was like reverse in the 2004 European Parliament, the men in grey kilts came for Mr Swinney – and Alex Salmond came back.
Much may hinge next week on Aberdeen South. Stephen Flynn has had a sterling campaign, including gutsy performances on TV debates.
If he holds on, and the broader SNP performance is as woeful as expected, one suspects – grey kilts optional – that the dirks will be swiftly tugged from the thatch.
