Scottish politics is different now than it was a fortnight ago. Labour’s surprise win in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election has changed the weather in this final year before the election.

For Labour and the SNP, this may be a victory of psychology over psephology. The numbers underlying Labour’s win in what became a three-horse-race are actually rather shaky. The party lost a couple of percentage points from its 2021 haul in the same constituency and, although the SNP plummeted by more than expected (17 per cent) the same vote swing nationally would still see First Minister John Swinney returned to office, with Anas Sarwar losing seats compared to 2021, not gaining them.

But for the two parties of the right, there are more existential issues to keep in mind.

The Tory party in Scotland finds itself in the hottest water it has encountered since devolution began. The party bumbled along for the first few terms of Parliament in the mid teens in vote share, translating to the high teens in seat numbers. As the anti-devolution party, they spent a fair bit of the first decade just trying to convince people they actually wanted to be there, with their first leader David McLetchie also making a good fist of putting into place some sort of liberal, free-market policy platform as an alternative to the social democratic consensus which was emerging.

Read more by Andy Maciver

The theoretical high-point of the party was when, under Annabel Goldie, it struck up an informal agreement to prop up the minority SNP administration of

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