To some extent, Gordon Brown deserves the plaudits he’s getting this morning. Yes, the Labour victory in Glenrothes will be have been catalysed by a number of factors – the quality of their candidate, Lindsay Roy; the financial and economic crises; the deployment, cynical though it may have been, of Sarah Brown; and the failings of the opposition campaigns. But in the background to all that was an uncharacteristic risk by our PM – his decision to closely involve himself in the campaign, made when party support for him was at a low ebb. And it paid off.
The post mortem now begins for the other parties. All will be asking questions and having questions asked of them. The SNP: whether their nationalist approach works during an economic downturn, when the Scottish public may be less inclined to be cast adrift from Westminster and the cash it represents. The Tories: how to fashion a coherent message on the economy, on which they’re currently being lorded over by the Government. And the Lib Dems: why they don’t seem to be registering with the electorate at all.
Answers to these questions, and many more, will need to be discovered. Make no mistake, this – despite the reduced Labour majority – is a more or less terrible result for each of the main opposition parties, and they’ll want to avoid repetitions in future. But they can take some solace from the fact that Glenrothes was only one in a long chain of hurdles for Brown. He may have cleared it with no little skill – and will most likely receive an opinion poll boost as a result – but there are still plenty more opportunities for him to fall flat on his face yet.
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