The National:

INVERNESS AND NAIRN

Winner in 2016: Fergus Ewing (SNP)

INVERNESS and Nairn’s predecessor seat of Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber had the distinction of being the only SNP constituency “gain” in the inaugural Holyrood election of 1999 – in other words it was the only constituency the party won without having taken the equivalent Westminster seat in the 1997 General Election.

It therefore added a small touch of glitter to a mildly disappointing national result. The winning SNP candidate was Fergus Ewing, husband of Margaret Ewing, who had been a Westminster MP for 17 of the previous 25 years. He was moved to observe: “Anything my wife can do, I can do later.”

Labour’s David Stewart held the Westminster seat at the time, courtesy of the Blair landslide, and indeed Labour were also Ewing’s nearest challengers in the early years of devolution. But this is far from being natural Labour territory.

Russell Johnston had held the predecessor constituency for the Liberals and then the LibDems for an uninterrupted spell between 1964 and 1997. Prior to that the Tories had been the dominant local force for a while.

The first sign that the tide was turning came in 1992 with one of the most peculiar results in UK political history: the LibDems held on, but with only 26% of the vote. Either Labour or the SNP, who took 25.1% and 24.7% respectively, could easily have made the gain, so it was rather fitting that by the end of the decade both parties had a share of the spoils.

The difference was that Labour’s breakthrough proved to be transitory, while Ewing has remained the constituency MSP for the entire period of devolution to date, with increasingly large majorities.

By 2016, he was winning for the SNP by almost 11,000 votes and it was the Conservatives who had moved into a very distant second place. It would take an enormous swing of more than 14% to dislodge him this year and that is extremely unlikely to happen.