Mr Popular

Nobody does unintentional comedy quite like the Guardian these days...

"The least well-known Scottish leader in its history, Lamont defeated another lesser-known backbencher, Ken McIntosh, and popular Westminster backbencher Tom Harris, the MP for Glasgow South, to win. McIntosh won 40.3% and Harris 7.95% of the vote."

Call me peculiar, but I always thought elections were a rather good test of popularity. So let's recap : Tom Harris is "popular", but he's just taken a gubbing at the hands of "the least well-known Scottish Labour leader in history" and "another lesser-known backbencher". Heaven only knows what would have happened to him if he'd been unpopular.

Ah well. Scottish Labour's gain is the blogosphere's loss. Or something like that.

And I really do think the Guardian are grossly overstating the scale of the challenge facing Johann Lamont as leader. Surely it's high time the press picked up on the inspiring message of hope and renewal that Labour's electoral college has just decisively delivered, ie. "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

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Scottish Labour persevere with their highly successful core vote strategy

Well, it would be massively over-the-top on this occasion to repeat what I said about the Tories a few weeks ago. Labour haven't made a historic error - not that choosing Johann Lamont wasn't an error, but it's hard to pretend that the alternative would have been much better. There was no-one on the ballot paper who could have matched Alex Salmond's charisma (and that includes Admin, in spite of his own high opinion of himself), and neither was there anyone who really "got it" about where Labour have been going wrong. Macintosh perhaps came closest with his idea of dropping the word 'unionist' from the party lexicon, but I doubt there would have been much in the way of substance to complement the change of language.

And the same problem holds true of Lamont. OK, no-one can accuse her of concealing the fact that she's going to continue to conspire with the Tories to obstruct the Scottish people's aspirations for a more powerful parliament, but on non-constitutional matters she actually talked the talk today. For instance -

"Our one test will be what is in the interest of the people of Scotland, not what's in the interest of ourselves."

"I will reach out to people across Scotland who maybe never thought of themselves to be Labour..."

Now, does anyone think for a moment she's the person to do that? She has "core vote strategy leader" written all over her - and that strategy certainly worked a treat back in May.

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