It's D(unfermline)-Day

Get your lamb's livers out. Strive to discern the prophetic resonance of a cloud of starlings. Take the tarot. Today, the folk of Dunfermline go to the polls to decide who they would like to represent them in the Scottish Parliament. So who will it be? 

Will Fife councillor, Labour's Cara Hilton, prevail? Might the SNP's Shirley-Anne Somerville just sneak ahead? Will a yellow wave heave the Liberal Democrat candidate back into contention, or will James Black, Jacobite, take dirk and targe to everyone else, triumphing in the Kingdom before sweeping south to take the strategically-important city of Edinburgh (and heaven knows, continuing on to Derby and an excellent showing in the imminent Prestonpans by-election)? Will Zara Kitson's Green shoots show any sap, or will they be ground under heel by the blazered pub landlord figure nominated to represent the seat by UKIP? Oh. And there's a callow Tory youth to take account of as well, who has been railing against the flabby "centre left consensus" offered by everyone else. 

At the outset of the race, Bill Walker having been confined to a prison cell with the worst grace conceivable, I thought the SNP were going to get stuffed. Much of this was down to the Walker Factor, though not entirely. Although he demitted office as an independent, in disgrace, I could sympathise with the unaligned Dunfermline voter who felt that the Nationalists had, in some vague sense, let them down by nominating such a man to represent them in the national parliament. If they felt that way, we had to take it on the chin.

But if the SNP vote was going to collapse, the people wreaking their vengeance, you'd expect to see that reflected in the initial round of canvassing.  I'm told by knowledgeable hands on the ground in Dunfermline that this doesn't appear to have happened.  Ian Smart's recent by-election blog corroborated this diagnosis from the other side of the aisle.

A couple of potential explanations for this apparently limited Walker Effect.  One: the ex-MSP's conduct and manner after his conviction as a serial domestic abuser was so outrageous, and so idiosyncratic, that Walker managed to focus minds on his own character and its defects, rather than on the party which made the mistake of nominating him to represent Dunfermline.

Secondly: it has proved more difficult to hang Walker around Shirley-Anne's neck than it might initially have seemed, despite Cara Hilton's zealous early efforts to do so. Shirley-Anne is palpably a different sort of person from the bluff, pompous and domineering Walker. If the SNP had nominated an ashen suit of a certain age, you can wager ten groat that the outgoing representative for Dunfermline would have remained more of an issue in this campaign.

Beyond the Walker Effect, it is important for us remember that Dunfermline was always going to be a very promising seat for the Labour Party. An unexpected gain in the 2011 Holyrood election, the SNP won it, beating Labour by just 590 votes.  In the 2012 local government election, Labour enjoyed a massive lead in first preferences, running 3,710 votes ahead of SNP candidates in Dunfermline wards. Factor into that the prevailing wisdom that incumbent governments struggle with by-elections, and the constituency always looked like a difficult hold for the Nationalists, and a must-win for Johann Lamont's Labour Party. 

To reframe that in a nakedly cynical way, we'll go into tonight with a pocket full of plausible and temporising explanations. By contrast, if Labour comes out anything but top of the heap in Dunfermline, excuses there are none. The ongoing Grangemouth story will knock the by-election result into a cocked hat, but if one of Johann's isn't sworn in in Holyrood, expect a volley of critical questions about the quality of her leadership and her party's current lack of direction.  

Whatever happens, Dunfermline also attests to the bother which Lamont's unfollowed up "something for nothing" speech continues to give her colleagues. Are Labour in favour of or against retaining universally-accessible free prescriptions, an un-means-tested bus pass for the elderly, the state paying for university tuition and arresting additional rises in the council tax across all bands? Bracket the question of who introduced these policies, and whether the Labour Party have supported them in the past. The record speaks for itself in that respect.  Is this the policy platform which Lamont and her colleagues now wish to stand on?

Even trying to be fair-minded, I'm not entirely sure. It may be that the Scottish Labour leadership hasn't made up its mind yet. That's grand. Periods between elections are periods for reflection, particularly for a party reviewing its fortunes after two consecutive defeats. But for folk like Cara Hilton, obliged to snatch up the party banner unexpectedly, and to set out and defend a policy prospectus, Lamont's under-explained "something for nothing" speech is an absolute nightmare. You can't make credible policy commitments on any of these core issues "when everything is up for review", but until Labour decides what it makes of the council tax freeze, university funding, prescriptions and bus passes, all of these policies hang under a vaguely-threatening cloud.  

We saw identical wriggling from the Labour candidate in Aberdeen Donside. Neither he, nor Hilton, have their marching orders. And caught in the eye of the camera, subject to the tender inquisitions of Brian Taylor and Bernard Ponsonby, both Hilton and Aberdeen's Willie Young took on the consistency of blancmange, vaguely trembling as they attempted to explain their positions on very basic, well-established issues of devolved policy.  I feel for them.  They're the ones obliged to look like numpties on telly, and in order to shore up their awkwardly indeterminate policy positions, to put out leaflets on these issues in a spirit of creative compliance with the truth. 

If, as most folk predicted on twitter this morning, the numbers stack up for Cara Hilton, and Labour win in Dunfermline this evening, it will be in great part despite, rather than because of the tactical position Johann has abandoned her party to, mid-term.