BREAKING: Stuart Campbell dramatically downgrades his claim about next year's Holyrood election from "there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority" to "I think it's unlikely that pro-indy parties will win more than 61% of the seats"

A couple of preambles to this.  Firstly, although the intensity of my interest was perhaps not quite as great as "feminist bloggers" such as Stuart Campbell (no chortling at the back), I did watch the live-feed of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman, and I was enormously relieved by it.  And although the Scottish Government were nominally defeated, I suspect they (or at least many within their ranks) will be privately relieved too.  The position they were arguing for was incoherent and would have been a festering sore if it had been upheld.  In principle, these decisions should of course be taken by solely Scottish authorities and interpreted solely by Scottish courts, but in a universe where that doesn't yet happen, the Supreme Court has at least gifted the independence movement with another golden opportunity to draw a line under the destructive gender identity wars, and let's hope we take it.

Secondly, although this blogpost indirectly relates to the Holyrood numbers released from the Find Out Now poll yesterday, I'm being slightly cautious about covering those numbers until I see the data tables, which at time of writing have not been published yet.  Regular readers will understand the reason for my caution after the bizarre drama of the last Holyrood poll from Find Out Now at the start of this year, when the results were initially misreported and Ballot Box Scotland then "blacklisted" Find Out Now on the basis of how implausible he found the misreported numbers to be.  (For reasons only he can explain, he seemingly didn't reverse that decision even after the error came to light.)

Nevertheless, the results of the new poll as they've been reported do point to pro-independence parties winning 79 seats at the Holyrood election next year, and unionist parties winning only 50 - which would obviously be an overwhelming pro-indy majority.  Mr Campbell has written a scathing and probably rather foolhardy blogpost in which he not only claims the numbers are obviously ridiculous, but specifically attacks John Curtice's method of projecting constituency seats.  I think I'd just gently point out that Professor Curtice, as the UK's leading psephologist bar none, is unlikely to have not thought his projection model through in the rather simplistic way Mr Campbell is suggesting, and that if the numbers do turn out to be wrong in any way, it'll be because the vote share percentages were wrong, not because Professor Curtice knows less about how to convert percentages into seats than Mr Campbell does.

Nevertheless, Mr Campbell is so sure of himself that he offers a wager to any of his readers who think pro-indy parties will actually win 61% of Holyrood seats (which is what 79 amounts to).  But just one snag, Stew: you've already said there is "zero" chance of pro-indy parties winning a majority of seats next year, which means of course that the benchmark for your certainty is 50.1% of seats, not 61%.  So why are you only offering a wager based on 61% of seats, not 50.1%?  This wouldn't be your crafty way of downgrading your previous monumentally stupid claim, and doing it with such bombast that you hope no-one will notice?

If not, please confirm that you're also offering wagers based on your original claim, made only four months ago, that there is "zero" chance of pro-indy parties winning 50.1% of seats.  Who knows, I might even be tempted myself.