David Brent is a CyberTory

One or two of you may have noticed that I wasn't quite able to stand firm on what was my (genuine) resolve to stop posting on Political Betting at the start of the year - there's something about that site that seems to be more addictive than crack cocaine. Perhaps, though, I should heed the old adage that 'you should never give up giving up'. Anyway, after a short break I quickly reverted to posting regularly, but unsurprisingly I've now made myself such a target (by inexplicably and odiously turning my face against all things Tory) that a simple 'hello' tends to be greeted with a "why do you always have to be such a w****r, James?" from the usual suspects. Even worse, the membership of the usual suspects appears to be ever-expanding, and now includes a particularly delightful poster called 'Chris q00' (catchy moniker, I'll grant him that) who enjoys nothing better than interrogating me for hours at a time on why the SNP reneged on its pledge at the 2003 Holyrood election to hold an independence referendum by 2007. (Yes, I know, it's because the SNP didn't actually win the 2003 election, but the simpler the explanation the more the poor guy seems to struggle with it.)

So it's naturally quite difficult to maintain any sort of patience with such a buffoon, and when today he ludicrously suggested that Michael Foot as Prime Minister would have taken the UK into the Warsaw Pact, I told him rather directly that I thought that was an utter joke. Curiously, this did not provoke a reaction from Chris q00 himself, but from another Tory poster called Casino Royale, who launched into this bizarre tirade, which by the sounds of it he's been storing up for, well, quite some time -

"Can you come onto this website without being nasty and vindicative to people James?

Quite frankly, I’m tired of your attitude. You never have a good word to say about anyone and are permenantly sarcastic and insulting to other posters.

In other words: an a**ehole.

You being “you” I know you’ll try and instantly turn that back on me but why not be a mature adult for once?

Take the feedback, reappraise how you behave on here and act on it."

I naturally pointed out the supreme irony of a man complaining about 'insults' and 'never having a good word to say about anyone' when he's in the middle of using words like 'a**ehole' to indulge his own personal grudge without the slightest provocation. But there was more to come, and fascinating it was too. It appears that his criticisms of me are not personal or partisan at all, but are instead objective, constructive, and deeply rooted in his - ahem - professional experience.

"This is serious. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

Trust me: I’ve worked with several individuals in my company who’ve exhibited the same behaviours you do on here. The HR training was incredibly interesting. The ones who became happy and successful people took the feedback on board and learnt from it. They didn’t take it personally. Even if at first, they did. They understood HR were trying to help them.

Of the rest, the ones who chose to ignore it or refused to attend the training, a couple had nervous breakdowns and all of them managed to alienate all their peers and colleagues which only compounded the problem. Some lost their jobs because of it.

Which approach do you think was the right one?"

Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that the understandable stress and panic induced by the rapidly vanishing opinion poll lead is causing some CyberTories to turn into David Brent?

Angus Robertson for Prime Minister!

Last night, I posted a comment I had left on Michael Crick's blog, pointing out that it is not necessary for a party to stand in a majority of seats for its leader to become Prime Minister, blowing a hole in the argument that simply rebranding the leaders' debates as 'Prime Ministerial Debates' somehow justifies at a stroke the total exclusion of the SNP and Plaid Cymru. So I was intrigued to hear on Newsnight tonight Crick subtly switching to a different rationale - "of course, the Nationalist leaders are not seeking to become Prime Minister..." I'm of course not suggesting for a moment that my comment was responsible for this shift, but I do wonder if he reflected on his original explanation and realised for the same reasons just how woolly it was.

So assuming we now have the definitive explanation for why the SNP don't qualify for inclusion in the leaders' debates (sorry, keep forgetting, the 'PMDs'), it seems on the face of it there is now a very simple remedy available for the party. All they have to do is release a statement confirming that their (nominal) aim in this election is for their parliamentary leader, Angus Robertson, to become Prime Minister at the head of either a minority or coalition government, as is perfectly possible according to numerous precedents both in this country and beyond. And since, according to Crick, the PMDs are intended for politicians seeking to become PM, that should remove any lingering objections to the SNP's participation.

In any case, I've thought for a long time that the SNP should make clear that Angus Robertson is the person they are seeking to put up for the debates. That would deprive their opponents of the red herring argument that "Alex Salmond isn't even standing in this election", which was always a deliberate diversion from the central issue - the SNP's right as a party to have representation in the main debates.

It's interesting that there is no indication yet of whether the SNP are planning to seek legal redress on their exclusion. I can understand their caution, because if by any chance they were defeated in court there would unavoidably be a degree of negative publicity. However, I personally really feel that the stakes are just too high for this to go untested in court. Remember, it's not just about this election - a precedent is about to be set that will affect every subsequent election for the forseeable future.

When is a leaders' debate not a leaders' debate?

Michael Crick should be commended on his honesty, because he's effectively conceded in his blog that the broadcasters are deliberately cooking up a wheeze for the sole purpose of entirely excluding the SNP and Plaid Cymru from the main televised election debates. The proposed 'solution' to what many have conceded is the Nationalists' fairly unanswerable case for representation seems to be the rough equivalent of just sticking on a sultry voiceover from Dervla Kirwan to inform us that "these are not just leaders' debates...these are BBC/Sky/ITV Prime Ministerial Debates".

As explained by Crick, the logical basis for this brainwave is that, as the SNP are only standing in 59 out of 650 seats, Alex Salmond can't become Prime Minister, and therefore by definition can't qualify for a 'Prime Ministerial Debate'. I left the following comment on the blog to express my (to put it mildly) scepticism, which will hopefully appear once it's been through the moderation process -

"Nope. This still won't stand up in a Scottish court, which is presumably exactly where the SNP will be heading if they are to be outrageously excluded altogether from the main debates. Contrary to the implication of Michael's post, it is simply not necessary for a party to stand in a majority of seats to become Prime Minister - the 1924 Labour government had just 191 seats out of 615. In the early 1990s the Indian Prime Minister represented a party that had a tiny minority of seats in parliament, and there are numerous examples from continental European countries as well. Once that indisputable fact is pointed out in court - and it'll take about ten seconds - this rather desperate and cynical attempt to draw a distinction between 'party leaders' and 'Prime Ministerial candidates' will disintegrate rather quickly. Of course everyone knows Alex Salmond isn't going to be PM, but then everyone knows precisely the same about Nick Clegg. The principle is exactly the same for both leaders - and neither of them, incidentally, are leaders of nationwide parties (the Lib Dems don't stand in Northern Ireland, and nor do Labour for that matter).

Strictly speaking, under the British system it's not even necessary to be a party leader to become Prime Minister, only an MP or peer - witness the cases of both Lloyd George or Churchill. So by that standard, there are not three potential 'candidates for Prime Minister' standing at the election, nor four, or even five, but in fact several thousand. I'd suggest a conventional party leaders' debate would be preferable to such a melee, even if (horror of horrors) that means actually providing fair representation to the leaders of all four major parties in both Scotland and Wales."

SNP still polling strongly with ComRes

In the light of the utter confusion over the last 48 hours about the polling situation in Scotland (the entirety of this evening's Newsnight Scotland was even devoted to it), just about any scrap of additional information is potentially useful. I must admit my pessimistic working assumption has been that YouGov's bleaker figures for the SNP are probably closest to the truth, but a little bit of contrary evidence has been provided by the latest ComRes subsample. It appears that the previous figures from the same firm were not the blip we might have assumed, and the SNP are still well ahead of where YouGov say they are, although admittedly they have once again slipped marginally behind Labour. Here are the full figures -

Labour 31% (+4)
SNP 29% (-5)
Conservatives 20% (-2)
Liberal Democrats 17% (+6)
Others 4% (-2)

Set against this relatively good news for the SNP, we have to bear in mind that the Scottish subsamples from YouGov's daily GB-wide polls have typically been showing somewhat lower figures for the party, broadly in line with their full-scale poll in Scotland on Sunday.

Another sensational Ipsos-Mori poll for the SNP

What numbers would you expect from an opinion poll that the Times are portraying as superb for Labour and an unmitigated disaster for the SNP? I suspect you'd be a tad surprised to hear that they put the SNP on course for their best general election performance in history? Well, that's exactly what they show. You can only really laugh at the newspaper's breathless attempts to help its readers appreciate the sheer scale of the SNP's 'collapse' - "the SNP, on 32 per cent support, are now 2 percentage points behind Labour on 34 per cent — a direct reversal of MORI’s findings only three months ago." So a change fully within the standard margin of error over a period of a mere quarter-of-a-year - yes, this is an implosion of truly apocalyptic proportions we're talking about here.

To be fair, of course, there was a YouGov poll in Scotland on Sunday yesterday that would have justified every bit of the Times spin. You can just imagine Jenny Hjul in the editorial meeting plaintively asking "why did we have to get landed with frigging Ipsos-Mori?"

These polls are of course utterly irreconcilable - so which is the accurate one? As a natural pessimist, instinct tells me that the position can't possibly be quite as rosy for the SNP as Ipsos-Mori paints, but on the other hand their figures aren't being conjured out of thin air. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes, and given the premature gloating from the likes of Kenny Farquharson over the weekend, I suspect the SNP would settle for that.

I've never voted Conservative before, but I'm a progressive, liberal unionist

A few months ago, the self-styled 'liberal unionist' Northern Ireland blogger Chekov went off on one about the DUP, on an issue that any liberal ought to be proud to do so, namely the elements within that party still supportive of the death penalty. However, I think I mentioned at the time my bemusement at Chekov's apparent incredulity over the issue, as if he was revealing the reason why the DUP could be regarded as the most neanderthal party in the western world. Sadly, support for capital punishment remains considerably more mainstream than we might wish on the right of politics in the United Kingdom - if not, ironically, in the Republic of Ireland!

But there's another irony - or to be more blunt, a gaping hole of illogicality - in Chekov's position. For the other thing that regularly gets his goat up is even the slightest suggestion that the new link-up between the Ulster Unionist Party and the Conservatives may not be the most exciting development in politics since the advent of universal suffrage. Whenever it's pointed out that the UUP is an ideologically-mixed party, and that there are many left-of-centre party members who can only feel naturally at home in a moderate unionist rather than conservative party, Chekov simply repeats the rather jaw-dropping mantra that everyone knows the Conservatives are now the most 'progressive' party in UK politics, and any argument to the contrary is simply not 'sustainable'. Really? Even when you consider the new survey findings that twenty per cent of Conservative prospective parliamentary candidates favour the restoration of the death penalty? Given Chekov's claimed astonishment that anyone at all could hold such views in the modern world, I'd suggest a true progressive could only really feel comfortable in a party that doesn't put up candidates who do. But if Chekov really does have his heart set on a British mainland party, there are thankfully many that fit the bill for him to choose from - Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Greens...but not the Tories. Categorically not the Tories.

And a small postscript. After the industrial quantities of bile he's heaped on Sylvia Hermon for daring to disrupt - by perfectly democratic means - the carefully laid plans to install a Tory/UUP MP for North Down, it's also rather startling to see Chekov suddenly do a complete about-turn now that there's a vague (and not very plausible) suggestion that she could stand as a Labour candidate, rather than as an independent. It would be the 'honourable' thing for Hermon to do, he tells us.

Words fail me. You can have any colour you like, as long as it's black. In Chekov-world, any political stand is a principled stand - just so long as it's a UK integrationist political stand.

How can the SNP capitalise on a hung parliament?

It's extraordinary when you consider where we were just three or four months ago, but as of this moment we really do appear to be heading towards a hung parliament. I emphasise 'as of this moment', because with the bizarre series of twists and turns we've seen over the course of this five-year parliament, it could all look very different in a few weeks' time! But there's no question about where we stand right now - with four successive YouGov polls showing a six-point Tory lead, and the latest ICM poll showing a seven-point lead, the tightening of the position can't be put down to rogue polls or sampling issues.

So where does this leave the SNP? A great deal has been made of the possibility that the party may now fall way short of the twenty seat target set several years ago by Alex Salmond. The Liberal Democrats will be the real power brokers even if there is a hung parliament, we are told, with the SNP and their handful of MPs remaining firmly on the periphery. But the chance to look back at the 1974 election last week reminded me that it all turned out rather differently last time round. The Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe imagined they had been landed with the golden opportunity they'd been waiting decades for - but got precisely nothing out of it. They didn't get electoral reform, or the chance to serve in a coalition government. A few years later, in the period of the Lib-Lab pact, they were banking a great deal on at least securing the very minor consolation prize of proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament, but failed even on that count.

By contrast, the SNP - who won just seven seats in February 1974, exactly the same number as they hold now - exploited the hung parliament situation to achieve something quite extraordinary. They turned Labour's whole policy on Scottish devolution on its head, and ensured that much of the following five years was taken up with the attempts to get a Scottish Assembly onto the statute book. Ultimately, thanks to the cynical machinations of George Cunningham and co., it wasn't to be, but nevertheless 1974 marked a truly historic shift in Labour's thinking on the issue that undoubtedly paved the way for the Scottish Parliament we now have. So who said small parliamentary groups are in no position to win significant concessions?

The question really is, if the SNP find themselves in such an influential position once again following this general election, what their shopping list should be. We've heard quite a bit of speculation that support for any minority government might be conditional on extra economic assistance for Scotland. The logic for this is obvious, and might well appear to be the only responsible priority in the current circumstances. But I think the party would do well to remember just how long the Liberals (and indeed the rest of us) have had occasion to regret their failure to secure a fair voting system when they had the chance in 1974. Golden opportunities don't come along very often, and need to be seized with both hands when they do. I'd suggest therefore that, from a strategic point of view, progress towards the prize of a more powerful Scottish Parliament should be a very high priority for the SNP as well.

The golden path by which the Great Britain women's curling team won't qualify for the Olympic semi-finals

Quite possibly the greatest tragedy of Scotland not having qualified for a major football tournament since France '98 is that it's deprived us of our biennial, highly cerebral national pastime of poring over fixture sheets, calculators in hand, trying to fathom out the various improbable permutations by which "Scotland can still mathematically reach the second round". Perhaps the all-time classic was the World Cup in 1990, when even after the unlucky defeat to Brazil in the final group match, all we needed was for South Korea to sneak a draw against Uruguay. The Koreans duly held out until injury time at the end of the match - at which point Uruguay scored. But, still, all was not lost - just so long as neither Holland v Ireland or England v Egypt ended in a draw. Not too much to ask surely? Well, let's not dwell too much on that question.

But at least the British (ahem) women's curling team have given us an opportunity to relive those halcyon days, because despite their Olympic campaign completely falling apart with a succession of defeats-from-the-jaws-of-victory, it is still technically, arithmetically, perfectly possible for them to qualify for the semi-finals. So, as a free public service, here's your handy cut-out-and-keep guide for how it probably isn't going to happen over the next 24 hours. All we need to happen is this -

Great Britain to beat Canada
AND Germany to beat Switzerland
AND Japan to lose to either Denmark or Sweden
AND United States to beat Switzerland
AND Sweden to beat Germany

Easy as that. If all that comes to pass we'll qualify for a series of tie-breaks to decide the fourth berth in the semi-finals. Sadly, the chances of even getting past the "Great Britain to beat Canada" bit of the equation don't look particularly healthy.

Gordo - where's the lava?

Something struck me earlier when pondering the issue of Gordon Brown's alleged bullying of junior staff - especially the part of the story that is relatively undisputed, namely that he has a 'volcanic temper'. We take that fact as a given, because we've heard it from so many different sources over the years, but when I thought about it I realised that, oddly, I couldn't actually picture what Gordon Brown "erupting" might look like in reality. Over the years on television I've seen him glower, sulk, pout, and generally drone on relentlessly in speeches, but never actually explode. I suppose the lesson is that, perhaps surprisingly, it is actually possible for a person in the public eye to keep one of their key personality traits strategically hidden from view, even over a period of decades.

ComRes subsample : SNP storm into lead

I haven't been covering subsamples so much of late, but given the unanticipated new passion for them that the press and our friends in the Tory blogosphere have been exhibiting over the last few days, this one really can't pass without comment. For the first time since late November, a ComRes poll is showing the SNP back in an outright lead over Labour. Here are the full figures -

SNP 34% (+9)
Labour 27% (-7)
Conservatives 22% (+5)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-5)
Others 6% (-1)

These numbers are even more startling given that, in the same poll, Labour have cut the Conservatives' GB-wide lead to just eight points. Labour are down twelve points in Scotland on their 2005 general election share, compared to just a six point drop across Britain as a whole.