The dizzyingly fast transition between "Old Stew" and "New Stew": fickle Somerset blogger's shock confession that he has gone from saying there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood after the 2026 election to now saying there is a 100% certainty of the SNP winning an *outright majority on their own*

I'm indebted to an anonymous commenter on the previous thread for pointing out another astounding feature of Stew's blogpost today that I initially overlooked - 

"Campbell is making a complete blithering idiot of himself at this point. It really is great fun. In the space of just six months, he's gone from 'there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority, barring an alien invasion' to 'anyone who says the SNP will take fewer than 65 constituency seats is manifestly, obviously, indisputably idiotic'. 65 seats means he's now predicting not just a pro-indy majority, but a single-party SNP majority! Life comes at you fast.

Keep doing what you're doing, James, in his frantic desperation to 'prove you wrong', all he's succeeding in doing is exposing his own bluster for what it is."

And in case anyone is in any doubt, yes, he really has transitioned over a period of a few months (actually five months or so) from saying that there is zero chance of a pro-independence majority after the 2026 Holyrood election to saying that there is a 100% chance of the SNP on their own having a single-party majority after the 2026 Holyrood election.  The evidence is there in black and white - 

"Old Stew", 3rd December 2024: "We’re going to call this one early: there is zero prospect of a pro-indy majority after the next Holyrood election. None. Barring a nuclear war or an alien invasion or some equally implausible revolutionary event, it’s simply not happening"

"New Stew", 11th May 2025: "Labour are the opposition in most of the 62 constituency seats currently held by the SNP, and we cannot think of a single one they could credibly hope to capture...Similarly, with the Tory constituency vote in the True North poll having been HALVED from the 22% they got in 2021, there is no sane way to imagine them either holding the four seats we’ve turned SNP yellow on that map...or capturing any that are currently held by anyone else...And as far as we can think off the top of our heads, the only seat anywhere in Scotland in which the Lib Dems are in 2nd place and might therefore have a realistic chance of taking it from the SNP is Caithness, Sutherland and Ross...so we’ve given them it on our projection...That gives the SNP 65 constituency seats...we invite anyone to provide examples of seats they think we’ve got wrong."

For the uninitiated, there are 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, so if the SNP win a minimum of 65 constituency seats, as Stew claims they are certain to do, they will have an outright majority in the parliament even if they do not win a single list seat.  So Stew really has gone from saying in December that there was a zero per cent chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood to saying now that there is a 100% chance of a pro-independence majority in Holyrood, and indeed that there is a 100% chance of the SNP winning only their second outright single-party majority in Holyrood, and their first since Alex Salmond was First Minister.

I don't know if he thinks his readers have the memory-span of goldfish or if he just thinks they're stupid, but to state the bleedin' obvious, this is not a credible 'evolution of a prediction'. He's turned the compass completely upside down and hoped no-one will notice.  And there hasn't been an alien invasion or a nuclear war since December, so there are no excuses for him there - there have been political events over the last few months, of course, but nothing that wouldn't have looked to be well within the bounds of the possible.  

For those of you who still haven't twigged how Stew operates, I'll let you into a little secret - he didn't believe in December that there was no chance of a pro-indy majority, and he doesn't believe now that the SNP are certain to win a majority on constituency seats alone.  What he does is look at the prevailing situation and try to find an 'angle' to bash the SNP with.  In December, it was "oh the SNP are doing so badly, there's no chance of a pro-indy majority so there's no point in voting for them, best be sensible and cast a protest vote instead, troops!", and now it's "oh the SNP are doing so well, they're going to win practically every constituency, that means they have no chance to win any list seats, best be sensible and cast a tactical vote against the SNP, troops!"

Both versions are complete tripe.  He's been challenging people all day to identify which of the 65 constituency seats he says are nailed-on for the SNP might be won by another party.  Well, that's not actually a very difficult thing to do, because the standard projections from current opinion polls are not showing the SNP on 65 constituency seats - hardly surprising, because even under first-past-the-post it's phenomenally improbable that a party could win 89% of the seats on 33% or 34% of the vote.

For example, if you plug the results of the most recent Survation poll into the best known seats projector, it has the SNP winning only 57 constituency seats - eight fewer than what Stew claims is a certainty.  They would lose East Lothian to Labour, Banffshire & Buchan Coast and Ayr to the Conservatives, Caithness, Sutherland & Ross to the Liberal Democrats, and Glasgow Kelvin to the Greens (I'm dubious about the latter, but who knows).  They would also fail to gain the four seats from the Tories that Stew says they would be certain to do.

I really don't know how the cult members manage to keep taking this guy seriously given the regularity with which he makes claims of absolute certainty that rapidly turn out to be completely wrong, and then tosses them into the memory hole with a shrug and a "that never happened, you know".  But what I would say is this: for God's sake, keep your money firmly in your pocket when he claims today on Twitter that the SNP are so certain to take 65 constituency seats and no list seats that such an outcome can be safely bet upon.  He doesn't believe a word of what he's saying, and if by any miracle he really is daft enough to believe it, he is catastrophically wrong, yet again.