Just when I wasn't looking...

Oh dear. There was me busily speculating last night about what a full-scale Scottish poll might show, and I had rather spectacularly failed to notice that one had just been published under my nose! I suppose in one sense my instinct was right, as Labour remains ahead in Westminster voting intention (the gap is a little larger than I might have thought but not enormous) while the SNP retains a lead in the Holyrood constituency vote (albeit a narrow one). The surprise - and what the Sunday Times are delightedly, not to say utterly hysterically, crowing about - is Labour's lead in the list vote, which rather unusually places Labour ahead in the (always utterly meaningless) seat 'projection'.

There really is nothing for the SNP to panic about here - the party's raw percentages remain very high. As Alex Salmond pointed out this morning, on this poll their support has increased since the 2007 Holyrood election, and indeed they've led many recent opinion polls on lower percentages than this. So what we're left with is the mystery of an apparent massive Labour surge in Scotland at the expense of the Tories, at a time when the precise reverse is happening everywhere else in the UK. I'm not going to fall into the AM2 trap of saying that because the numbers seem implausible to me they must be wrong, but it will be intriguing to see if the next poll (if we're lucky enough to get one inside the next few months) corroborates these rather startling findings. Or to put it another way - I'm not convinced, but I stand ready to be proved wrong.

On one point I'm more confident, though - the European election figures from the poll (suggesting a Labour lead of seven points) can be discounted as fairly meaningless at this stage. The turnout for the European poll is typically so low that almost anything could happen - and that could be to the benefit of Labour (as in 2004) or to the SNP (as in 1999 and 1994).