The National:

LABOUR really must be on the ropes.

Saying that Keir Starmer’s visit to Scotland would only be attended by one press agency, and then slying inviting one friendly newspaper on the side, isn’t the behaviour you might expect from a party in a strong position.

Neither, for that matter, is clutching at fragments of polls and claiming they show Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer could be on to complete the hat-trick and get Labour into all three of Great Britain’s governments.

But then, would anybody be surprised if they did?

Prepare not to be surprised, as serial tweeter George Foulkes has opened his phone again.

The “Baron of Cumnock” wrote: “A small straw in the wind? Latest Ipsos MORI Scottish poll subset shows @ScottishLabour on 37% & @theSNP on 31%.

“The start of Starmer/Sarwar overtaking Sturgeon/Johnson?”

Social media users poked fun at the Labour lord. "A small straw in the wind, more like clutching at straw," one quipped.

"Is this a parody account?" a second asked.

Foulkes was referring to minutiae in the Ipsos MORI poll released on January 27 for which fieldwork was conducted between 19-25 of the same month.

It does state in that data that 27 people in Scotland said they’d vote Labour in a General Election, while only 23 said they’d vote SNP. It also said that just 10 would vote Tory, and only three LibDem.

However, the total sample was only 72 people, a data set so small it is “best ignored”, according to polling expert Mark McGeoghegan.

He told The Jouker: “The sub-sample of Scottish voters in Ipsos MORI's latest poll is just 72 people, and was not recruited to be representative of the population.

“Sub-samples are never reliable guides to a party's support among voters overall, and given that we have Scotland-specific polling that shows practically no change in support for Labour or the SNP, such sub-samples are best ignored.”

We’ll take that advice on a slightly wider basis and try to apply it to George Foulkes in general going forward.