91Èȱ¬

In some ways Glasgow East has been a very old-fashioned by-election.

Contrary to what many people expected (including myself), there haven't been swarms of MPs dragooned up here by the whips, certainly not on the scale of some of the big by-elections I've visited in the past, where party whips sometimes arranged coaches to bring their troops up from Westminster.

Media stunts and photo-opportunities have been fairly limited; few cabinet ministers have been seen, and all parties have concentrated on time-honoured campaigning methods - meeting people out on the streets, leafleting and knocking door-to-door - and this has been such a formidable Labour stronghold for so long that many voters here have probably never been canvassed by a political candidate in decades.

Labour has made much of the personality of their candidate Margaret Curran, whose photo appears 15 times on their main election address, whereas Gordon Brown's features - as you might have guessed - are not shown once.

Nor could I find any mention on Curran's leaflets, or on her website, of her predecessor as Labour candidate, David Marshall, the Labour MP for Glasgow East since 1979. He's become a non-person, it seems, suddenly airbrushed from Labour history.

He's played no role at all in Curran's campaign, and hasn't even got Labour posters up on his house, which, somewhat controversially, used to double up as his constituency office in his days as the MP.

Labour's strategy seems to be working. Several voters have mentioned how they don't think much of Gordon Brown's performance, but admire Margaret Curran and her record as a feisty, tough-talking MSP and minister in Edinburgh, and that's why they'll be voting for her.

What's more, there's little of the anger with Labour which was obvious in Crewe and Nantwich. Labour will lose people to the SNP, but probably not in sufficient numbers to lose the seat.

The SNP candidate John Mason, in contrast, doesn't seem to appear much in public without either his party leader Alex Salmond, or Salmond's deputy Nicola Sturgeon, which rather gives the impression that he can't be let loose on his own.

One voter yesterday described the contest as Margaret Curran against Alex Salmond.

The Tories have an interesting nominee in Davina Rankin, who, unusually for a Conservative candidate, is black (or strictly speaking, half black), and an active trades unionist. And their campaign has been pretty impressive. They know they won't win, of course, but have taken to the streets with gusto, energy and good humour, determined to show Glasgow is no longer a no-go area for them.
I've been impressed by how many voters have told me they will vote Conservative, which means the party may well save its deposit, and may even improve on the 6.9 per cent. I also expect the Conservatives to push the Lib Dems into fourth place.

That's unfortunate for the 30-year old Liberal Democrat contender Ian Robertson, who is a strong candidate and should go far, but his campaign lacks the energy, urgency and imagination we've come to expect from Lib Dems in by-elections.

It's a touch ironic that tomorrow they will probably suffer from the same kind of squeeze on also-ran parties which the Liberal Democrats have been brilliant at inflicting on third and fourth parties in the past.

One of the prime minister's advisers has ticked me off for saying in that Paul Gascoigne's famous goal for England against Scotland in the 1996 European Championship was Gordon Brown's "favourite football moment".

This is "a common myth," the adviser tells me. "I thought you'd know this is rubbish." He continues:

"Gordon was asked by a newspaper before the 2006 World Cup whether he'd ever been to an England match. He said that he'd been to several. He was then asked what was the 'most memorable' England match he'd been to. He named two. First, the Euro '96 game against Scotland because of the fantastic atmosphere at Wembley, with McAllister's penalty miss for Scotland followed by Gascoigne's great goal for England. Second, the qualifying game for France '98 between England and Italy in Rome, again because of the atmosphere and tension of the game.

"The paper chose to say that his "favourite England memory" was Gascoigne's goal against Scotland. This was refuted by us immediately afterwards and has been many times since."

I happily stand corrected.

Has Alastair Campbell come to the rescue of Gordon Brown, and gone to Scotland to advise the Labour Party on tactics in Glasgow East?

Yesterday morning Mr Campbell was spotted eating breakfast in the Crutherland House Hotel in East Kilbride, only a few miles from the Glasgow East constituency. The hotel subsequently confirmed to a colleague from 91Èȱ¬ Scotland today that Tony Blair's former spin-doctor was still staying there, which suggests that Campbell has spent at least two nights there.

Of course Mr Campbell may be in Glasgow for other reasons, but it's an interesting coincidence. It would be amusing to think that he was trying to save Gordon Brown's job when he was once reported to have described the Prime Minister as "psychologically flawed"(though Campbell denies ever saying that).

Mind you, Mr Campbell's advice doesn't come cheap nowadays. Labour's accounts from the last election showed that he'd charged them many tens of thousands for just a few weeks work.

William Hague may be one of the sharpest MPs at Westminster - possibly THE sharpest -but even he can make the occasional gaffe.

Today he was in a supermarket with the Conservative Scottish leader Annabel Goldie, who admitted yesterday she was a tad "overweight".

"I don't know anything about potatoes," said Mr Hague in front of the vegetable stall, as he turned to Ms Goldie and added: "You're the expert on potatoes - obviously."

SNP BY-ELECTIONS

The SNP, rather like the Liberal Democrats, have an image of being great by-election victors. True, they have won some famous contests over the years - such as Hamilton in 1967, and Govan in 1973 and again in 1988.
The records show, however, that in more than 70 by-elections contested in Scotland since 1945, the Scottish nationalists have won just five.

Walter Sweeney is part of a striking trend. By my calculation (with considerable help from my colleague Marc Williams in the 91Èȱ¬'s Political Research Unit), no fewer than 22 Conservative MPs elected under John Major's leadership in 1992 have subsequently left the party.

And quite neatly they have spread their defections fairly evenly across the political spectrum, as follows:

Five joined Labour: Alan Howarth, Robert Jackson; Peter Temple-Morris; Quentin Davies and Anthony Nelson.

Five joined the Lib Dems: Emma Nicholson, Peter Thurnham (recently deceased), Harold Elletson, Hugh Dykes and John Lee.

Seven joined UKIP: Roger Knapman; Jonathan Aitken; Neil Hamilton; Piers Merchant, Theresa Gorman, Sir Richard Body, and Bob Spink.

One joined the old Referendum Party: George Gardiner, (although he later rejoined the Conservative Party - he's now deceased).

And four have joined no other party at all so far as I know: Sir John Gorst, David Mellor, George Walden and Walter Sweeney.

There may be others, too.

One of the worst offences a broadcast journalist can commit is to get the name of a political candidate wrong in a broadcast. It happened to one of my 91Èȱ¬ colleagues many years ago, and his career never really recovered. And I live in fear it will happen to me one day, too.

Yet the error is a lot worse, surely, if you are the returning officer in a Parliamentary election, and you get a candidate's name wrong on the actual ballot paper.

For that's what happened in last Thursday's by-election in Haltemprice and Howden, where the returning officer must be squirming with embarrassment. He misspelt the name of the independent candidate Walter Sweeney, the former Conservative MP for Vale of Glamorgan who was campaigning on a platform calling for a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU (and resigned from the Tory Party in order to do so). Instead of Sweeney, the ballot paper said "Sweeny" without the final "e".

Read the rest of this entry

He has only just arrived back but David Davis is already finding life in Westminster a little different.

In one of the subtle ways they use to discipline their MPs, the Tory whips are signalling their displeasure: by giving him a much smaller office. He did have a grand office near the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons, now he has been moved to one of the smaller rooms in Portcullis House over the road, decidedly a bit of a snub.

As a former whip, with a fearsome reputation, David Davis understands the message they are sending. But they should be careful who they antagonise. As one close friend commented: "no-one knows how to run a guerrilla war in the Commons better than David".

This by-election must be the most bizarre that I will ever cover. Twenty-six candidates, an all-time record, which is especially remarkable given that neither Labour, the Lib Dems, UKIP nor the BNP are putting anybody up. Mathematically, it's actually possible to win this by-election and still lose your deposit - that would require a pretty even spread of votes as to save your deposit you need more than five per cent.

Read the rest of this entry