In the wake of his party’s surprise by-election victory last week, Anas Sarwar turned to the Scottish commentariat to say, “I told you so.” His opponents, journalists, pundits, and pollsters had written off Scottish Labour and had done so to their detriment. He declared that John Swinney’s days in Bute House are numbered. A Scottish Labour press officer even showed up with a “humble pie” for the media – an apple tart, I believe.

And who could blame him? Here was the opportunity to turn the broad political narrative in Scottish Labour’s favour following nearly a year of decline and predictions of heavy defeat next May. But I’m sure that Scottish Labour’s leadership will not be reading too enthusiastically into the result, for the same reason that Mr Sarwar sought to squeeze every last drop of political capital out of it: because they aren’t stupid.

While the Labour win was indeed a surprise, it did not indicate a fundamentally different political environment than the one we had previously thought we were in, based on Scottish polling. As other analysts have pointed out since – including Ballot Box Scotland’s Allan Faulds, who in these pages provided a sobering corrective to the wild narrative swing that took place last weekend – this was a by-election victory full of caveats.

I won’t recount all of those caveats, but it suffices to say that going into the by-election, national polling suggested that, based on a proportional swing model, the SNP........

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