Back in the days when they weighed the Labour vote in Lanarkshire, the people’s party knew it could have fielded a Friesian heifer with learning difficulties in the area and still won. And sometimes it felt like it had.

Davy Russell, the Scottish Labour candidate in tomorrow’s Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election, seems to me a throwback to those halcyon times, when the maximum qualification for selection appeared to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, as long as you had served your time in the right trade unions and local government committees.

For Labour candidates, electioneering rarely involved complex sentence-building, in fact they were barely expected to open their mouths, because everyone they met on the campaign trail was intending to vote for them anyway.

They would not be expected to engage with journalists or, God forbid, to take party in live television debates and so for the most part they would smile, perhaps stuff an envelope or two, and spend the rest of the time practising filling in their parliamentary expenses’ claims.

Since then, two things have changed. The first is that the SNP has replaced Labour as the natural party of government in Scotland, and so it is nationalist candidates who are now expected to keep their counsel, avoid falling into any elephant traps and wait for the votes to roll in.

Read more by Carlos Alba

The second major development, and perhaps the most significant, is how the nature of campaigning has changed.

We saw it last week when Reform UK – Nigel Farage’s........

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