It's not just Leonard that we fail to recognise ... it's his party too

Crushed beneath the hooves of Ruth Davidson’s water buffalo and reversed over by the FM’s ministerial car, since his election to the party leadership, Richard Leonard has struggled to impinge on the popular consciousness.

With limited access to the broadcast media, an unfocused political agenda and a feeble opposition leadership team, Leonard has seemed content to be seen as Jeremy Corbyn’s man in Scotland, a political cypher.

While 78% of Labour voters in Scotland oppose Brexit, Leonard has caught his leader’s Bennite havers, showing no real interest in articulating a distinctively Scottish position. Along with his Brexit spokesman Neil Findlay, Leonard has been reduced to following the snail trail of the London line with a mop and bucket. And they’ve been doing so, doggedly.

Against that backdrop of obscurity, it is a small miracle that as many as 39% of the electorate can name Leonard as the man responsible for Scottish Labour’s ongoing state of stagnation and decay – 12% thought Jeremy was the heid neep, while 11% thought Kezia Dugdale was still in charge.

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Comically, Leonard’s name recognition was actually lower among Labour supporters than the public at large, with just 37% of Labour voters able accurately to identify their leader.

I have some sympathy with the idea that it is political movements which shape the world rather than personalities – but when you have no political movement and no personality ... well, let’s be generous and say the work gets rough.

So, less than encouraging signs, you might well think, for the much-diminished People’s Party as they meet in Dundee this weekend.

But Leonard isn’t discouraged. “We cannot rely on an automatic disillusionment with the SNP to do the job for us.” There is, he told delegates, “no iron law, no inevitability” of Labour forming the next Scottish Government. Captain Obvious strikes again. Stifle those chortles at the back.

Read against the backdrop of the polls, framing Labour’s return to power in terms of “inevitability” might strike you as desperately strange. The party has shed almost 5000 members in the past year, with membership contracting by 20%.

According to the latest Panelbase poll, commissioned by Wings Over Scotland, the party has dropped four percentage points on their rivals in the Holyrood battleground, languishing some eight points behind the Scottish Tories and 22% behind the SNP.

The Westminster picture is equally dirty work for Richard Leonard’s party. But worse, talk of the party’s “inevitable” restoration risks reminding people of the Bourbon sense of entitlement which has done the party such harm over the past two decades.

This week, the new BBC Scotland channel aired the first episode of its three-part documentary series, Yes/No: Inside The Indyref.

It is, in some ways, a curiosity it has taken the state broadcaster so long to pull together a more reflexive autopsy on the events of 2014 – but time lends welcome perspective, along with fading and selective memories.

But where should we begin this story? Winnie Ewing perched on her globe in Hamilton in 1967? The failure and mischief of 1979? Thatcher’s rule? The Tory wipe out and subsequent Yes-Yes vote to devolution in 1997? The many alienations from Tony Blair’s government which followed?

In the event, the BBC took us down the time tunnel to the May 3, 2007. They say the past is a foreign country, but it takes a power of imagination to fully transport yourself back to the country which flickered across BBC Scotland’s documentary reel this week.

The uncrackable permafrost of Labour’s political dominance seemed settled, taken for granted both by the party and its opponents.

All was not entirely well. Tony Blair’s administration was reaching its terminal phase. Jack McConnell’s coalition was curling at the edges. Gordon Brown wasn’t yet in Downing Street.

The world’s finances hadn’t crashed. Douglas Alexander was in his pomp as Secretary of State. And across the front page of the Sun newspaper, the legend read: “Vote SNP today and you put Scotland’s head in the noose.”

But vote SNP a substantial chunk of the electorate did. Polling 664,227 constituency votes to Labour’s 648,374, winning 47 seats to Labour’s 46, Jack McConnell was papped out of Bute House and his party out of power.

Although nobody predicted it at the time, Scottish Labour’s “little local difficulty” in its historic heartlands became the general rout which has left Leonard and company as still-glazed survivors in a world changed.

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Fiasco after fiasco followed the installation of the SNP minority government in Edinburgh. Entering Downing Street on a wave of positive poll ratings, Gordon Brown’s premiership rapidly soured. Installing the bullish Blairite Jim Murphy as Scottish Secretary, Labour embraced an abrasive line with the new Scottish administration.

The unconscious message? This upstart minority administration will be out within the year. We’ll be back. Scottish Labour always recall Talleyrand’s line about the Kings of France after they wrestled their crowns back from the people. They returned, he said, having “learned nothing, and forgiven nothing”.

Appointing Blairite Jim Murphy as Scottish Secretary sent the wrong message

They read the runes wrong. John Mason took Glasgow East from Labour in 2008. Wendy Alexander’s leadership was killed off by a cheque from the Channel Islands. In 2011, Iain Gray fell ungallantly on to a meatball marinara and eviscerated himself.

His failure gave rise to the pro-independence majority which helped secure the 2014 referendum – but more fundamentally, should have been the smart crack across the chops which the Labour Party needed to wake itself from its dogmatic slumber.

But Labour seems to have slumbered on, finding energy only for its internal factional battles. These still rumble on. In his speech on Saturday, Leonard blew the dog whistle of the Blairite betrayal narrative.

Claiming Labour “make our own history”, he said: “We are getting back to where we always should have been, the party of communities and the party of workers.” As political syllogisms go, this one may need work: “The Labour Party is terrible: Vote Labour.”

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We sometimes underestimate, I think, just how much Scottish Labour’s collapse has conditioned both the party’s and their opponents’ sense of politics. As former party spinner Kevin Pringle observes, for much of its modern history SNP candidates went home after general elections – not to parliament, never mind into ministerial office.

Nicola Sturgeon reflects: “I’m quite a pessimist about election campaigns. I think it is because I’ve lost so many election campaigns – I can never quite bring myself to actually believe that we’re going to win one.”

From the outside looking in, this might sound like a wildly implausible outlook for a senior SNP politician who has helped oversee three successful Scottish election campaigns to hold – but for someone whose political life straddles Labour’s dominance and collapse into near irrelevance, it rings psychologically true.