In his Scotland on Sunday column Duncan Hamilton examines the implications of last week's Holyrood leaders' debates for the election campaign. He compares Iain Gray's poor ratings and performances in the debates to the possibility that he could become first minister and concludes: "That's why I have always struggled to see Labour turning a poll lead into electoral victory. In modern, televisual elections leaders with those ratings just don't win."
Indeed. John Kennedy/Richard Nixon. Sweaty, unshaven and all that. But wait a minute. In the last UK televisual election the undoubted star of the show was Nick Clegg. However, by the election itself - rather than in the instant News at Ten polls and the like - the Clegg effect had evaporated, and the votes seemed cast more on what the voters thought about the substance rather than style.
And then Nick Clegg led his Lib Dem party into a rather opportunistic and unprincipled coalition with the Conservatives. Almost a year later and if the Lib Dems as a party and an electoral force isn't slowly imploding then it's definitely looking a bit frayed around the edges.
Thus in the final analysis the UK election debates told as little, so to that extent it would hardly come as a surprise if Iain Gray performed poorly in all the Scottish debates but ended up as First Minister - if voters really want a Labour victory then this will happen despite rather than because of Iain Gray, and of course the polls still suggest that that's a real possibility.
So to continue the reverse comparison with Nick Clegg, Iain Gray would run a highly effective administration, radically transform Scotland for the better and reserve his rightful place in the annals of the Labour Party in Scotland, a sort of Keir Hardie for the new millennium.
Er, perhaps not.
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2 comments:
Two things.
From memory, the wheels had began to fall off Clegmania around the time of the third debate - when Cameron got stuck into Clegg on imigration, more specifically the plans for an amnesty. However, what is not really mentioned is that the Lib Dems in losing 5 seats gathered the biggest amount of votes since the merger of the Liberals and the SDP. How many of the 6.5 million voters would still vote for them remains to be seen.
Secondly, Scotland is still essentially a Labour voting country, who would vote for a monkey if it wore a red rosette. It would have to be a decent monkey mind... I can see Gray becoming FM all to easily, just not a particularaly good one.
Thanks, Allan, I'd forgotten that about the Lib Dem's votes, assuming I ever knew it in the first place.
As for Labour monkeys in red rosettes, surely the danger now is a similar scenario with yellow rosettes? ;0)
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