The sight of Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street in the rain to call an election for July 4 may prove to be the unbeatable image of this campaign regardless of how many colourful photo opportunities our political classes muster amongst themselves in the coming weeks.
As I watched the declaration live, three immediate thoughts passed through my mind.
Firstly, I couldn’t help but wonder how much that suit cost?
Mr Sunak is known both for his expensive tastes and the enormity of his own private wealth to satisfy them.
Three grand, four grand? Can it ever recover from a downpour like that – could he?
The second reaction was one of silent fury, we’re going to have to postpone our holiday aren’t we.
It’s been a habit years in the making that we get away as soon as the Scottish Parliament goes into recess in late June.
I simply love an election, especially one which I’m not an active participant in.
I’ve been wholly signed up member of the election geek squad since I was 10 years old at the 1992 election.
What a killer twist that episode had. I just can’t be anywhere other than here.
The third response was simply to contemplate what this might mean for Scotland.
A general election in the summer holidays for most Scottish school kids. Very few people alive today have ever seen a July election.
In truth, there’s probably little difference between a July and November election when it comes to turnout.
What we might lose in July to sun-seekers jetting abroad, we’d likely have lost to the couch on a rainy pitch dark by 6pm on a November evening.
Swinney’s fury
In light of that I suspect John Swinney’s fury at the election being called is less about the disrespect it shows Scotland and more to do with the now very compressed window he has to scrape off all the barnacles from his election boat.
From Michael Matheson’s suspension from parliament to Peter Murrell’s police file being passed to the procurator fiscal.
From the rapid decline of Humza Yousaf’s reign to the rebellion from within and its break up with the Greens, the SNP has not had its troubles to seek of late and the poll numbers reflect that back.
Electoral Calculus do a wonderful job of aggregating all the polls in Scotland and seek to predict the result as a consequence.
They currently say that Labour will win the General Election in Scotland securing 35 of the country’s 57 seats.
That is substantially up on as little as a month ago when Labour, whilst still ahead, were looking at roughly 25 seats to the SNP’s 19, with remaining seats split between the Tories broadly in the North-East and the Borders, with the Lib Dems winning one seat in Fife and a few in the Highlands and Northern Isles.
The difference in these numbers is significant because if the former is true, Labour returning 25 seats sees them making a miraculous recovery from their 2019 result, but still returning MPs largely from the M8 corridor.
Draw as straight a line as you can from Inverclyde to East Lothian through the middle of Glasgow and Edinburgh and you get the picture.
Thirty-five seats means Labour adding on three quarters of the seats in Fife and creeping over the Tay Bridge.
‘Yes City’ opportunity for Labour?
Yes, the current polling predictions show Labour winning Dundee Central (formerly Dundee West) from the SNP.
A result like that would be simultaneously seismic for Labour and earth-shattering for the SNP.
In recent times, Dundee has felt like the ideological epicentre of the modern SNP.
It is home to recent First Minister Humza Yousaf, ministerial stalwart Shona Robison and long-serving MP Stewart Hosie.
The ‘Yes City’ also has an SNP council leader.
Whilst Labour have plugged away tirelessly for years here, it always somehow felt like too tall an order, until now.
It’s hard to believe that as little as five years ago I wondered whether I’d see another Labour government in my lifetime, so existential were the threats to the party then.
If its revival reaches the Perth Road, the party has had the most exceptional night and the tectonic plates of Scottish politics will have shifted quite fundamentally.
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