The National:

Winner in 2016: Gillian Martin (SNP)

ABERDEENSHIRE East, and its predecessor constituency of Gordon, was held by Alex Salmond during his seven-year tenure as First Minister. But that doesn’t in any sense mean that it’s a seat in which the SNP have always been strong.

When Salmond first announced his intention to stand there, the Liberal Democrat Nora Radcliffe was the incumbent and had a very healthy majority over the Tories. The SNP were in a distant third.

It was the same story in the equivalent Westminster constituency of Gordon. Malcolm Bruce, who later became Scottish LibDem leader, gained it upon its creation in 1983 and held on in every election until he retired in 2015 – usually very comfortably, although there was one exception in 1992 when the Tories gave him an almighty scare. During that period, the SNP most often found themselves third.

Given that history, it’s perhaps understandable that the LibDems were deeply sceptical about Salmond’s confidence that he would pull off the sizeable 8% swing needed to take the Holyrood seat in 2007. Even after the polls had closed, Bruce went on live TV to claim that the Lib Dems had held on, adding that his discussions with voters on the doorsteps had revealed that Salmond just wasn’t very popular in the area.

A few hours later when it became clear Salmond had in fact won, Bruce rather ungraciously announced that voters must have been misleading him and that they probably secretly fancied the idea of having someone high-profile as their MSP. Does that episode offer any lessons for the current election? Time will tell.

However, Salmond’s majority in 2007 was relatively modest at just over 2000 votes. It wasn’t until the constituency had been redrawn and renamed as Aberdeenshire East in 2011 that he surged to an astonishingly enormous win, assisted by the national collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote.

A year before he stepped down as an MSP in 2016, Salmond stood in the Westminster seat – still called Gordon – that had just been vacated by Bruce and pulled off a repeat of his 2007 feat, coming from a long way behind to oust the LibDems.

Since then, though, the SNP’s local fortunes have been more mixed. Salmond’s successor as the candidate in the Holyrood seat, Gillian Martin, inherited a mind-boggling majority of 50 percentage points, so it wasn’t a surprise that she won comfortably in 2016, but she did see her victory margin cut by around two-thirds to 17%.

That leaves little room for doubt that some of the SNP’s support in 2011 had been a personal vote for Salmond. But then in a further twist, Salmond lost his own Westminster seat to the Tories in the snap General Election of 2017.

The defeat was relatively narrow, suggesting the personal vote was still there to an extent but wasn’t sufficient to withstand the factors driving the Tory surge in the north-east. He also suffered due to the LibDems’ apparent decision to essentially abandon the Unionist vote in the constituency to the Tories and instead concentrate their resources on a small number of seats elsewhere in Scotland.

Martin will have been heartened that the SNP took Gordon back in the 2019 UK General Election with a new candidate, but perhaps dismayed by how close the result was – and also by the Tory hold in Banff and Buchan, which overlaps with her constituency too.

There’s every reason to suspect that the contest in Aberdeenshire East in a few days’ time may be much more competitive than Martin’s majority of almost 6000 votes would imply and that the Conservatives, not the LibDems, will be her sole credible challenger.

On the plus side, she’s well-regarded and has now had five years to build up a personal vote of her own. This is a difficult one to predict, but the SNP are probably entitled to be considered favourites.