It’s the day after the night before and there’s only one question will he or won’t he?
Go, that is.
Alex Salmond, of course.
When he conceded defeat early this morning it was this morning wasn’t it? he did not look or sound like a man about to put his feet up.
He didn’t manage to pull off the biggest trick in British politics but he did have a pretty decent story to tell.
More than one and a half million voters rallied to his standard and declared themselves ready to forge a new, independent Scotland.UPDATE: Alex Salmond announces resignationHe did manage to get an unprecedented number of voters off their backsides and into the polling stations in a display of political engagement we are never likely to see again.
The scale of that achievement is breathtaking as many people said Aye as voted SNP, Labour and Lib Dem combined in 2011. That’s pretty impressive.
Oh, and it looks as though he has not only secured near-as-dammit home rule for Scotland but also set off a chain of events which could well see the whole way we do politics in Britain redrawn.
And yet the buzz is that he will have to go.
Why?
There is a rule somewhere which says that when a political party gets a beating, a head has to roll. It may not be an actual rule, but it’s usually the case.
No one inside or outside his party could force him.
The “men in the grey coats” are not going to come round his place and say, “Alex old son, it’s time to go.”
But having come so close to his Holy Grail, so close he could taste it, can he motivate himself to see through the comparatively dull business of more devolution and being FM in a still devolved Scotland?
There are others around him who could do that.
Instead of staying on and risking death by a thousand cuts, he may feel that the time is right to go, to be remembered as the man who almost achieved the all-but-impossible and made the UK wake up and pay attention to little Scotland.
It may not come today, but once the dust has settled and he feels the succession is safe, Alex Salmond may well decide it is time for him to do something else.
Perhaps in November, at the party conference in Perth?