Nicola Sturgeon is this morning on course to return as first minister as the SNP secures a third term in government in Scotland.
Ms Sturgeon was seeking a personal mandate from voters to lead the country for the first time. She inherited the position last term from Alex Salmond after he stood down in the aftermath of the independence referendum.
As reports from counts came back with good news for the Nationalists, the picture for Scottish Labour grew grimmer. Ken Macintosh lost the Eastwood constituency he had held since 1999 to the Conservatives’ Jackson Carlaw.
Mr Carlaw, the party’s deputy leader, said: “It had been incredibly close all through the evening and this is not my first attempt at the seat, so I approach these things with all hope but a degree of fatalism as well.”
Amid a flurry of SNP victories, the Tories also celebrated in Ayr, which John Scott held.
Advertisement
They began to look hopeful they could fulfil Ruth Davidson’s ambition of becoming the official opposition. David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, said: “I’m confident we can achieve our objective to become the official opposition. That would be good for the Scottish parliament.”
The mood within Scottish Labour was not so buoyant. Failing to come second would be devastating for Kezia Dugdale. She has acknowledged she still has work to do to rebuild the party into a force capable of unseating the SNP but has been adamant throughout the campaign that she would not be beaten into third place. However, she has had to deal with the reverberations of the antisemitism row that has struck at the heart of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour at Westminster.
There was some good news for her when one of her predecessors as leader, Iain Gray, kept his constituency.
Meanwhile, the Nationalists failed to take Orkney and Shetland from the Liberal Democrats. Liam McArthur and Tavish Scott kept their seats.
And on the mainland, in a massively important result for the Lib Dems, Willie Rennie, the leader, won the North East Fife constituency. He said: “I’ve had the time of my life in this campaign.”
Advertisement
Lord Nicol Stephen, the former party leader, said: “I think we are bouncing back. We are fighting back.”
Ms Sturgeon arrived at the Glasgow count at about 3am and embraced Humza Yousaf, her candidate for the Pollok seat. Senior Labour figures had conceded earlier that they seemed to have lost every Glasgow constituency.
Accepting victory, Ms Sturgeon declared that the SNP had “made history” by winning its third Scottish election in succession.
She described the overall majority which looks certain to be delivered to the nationalist party as “a vote of confidence in the record in government of the SNP and a vote of trust in the SNP to lead our country forward” while calling the apparent collapse in support for Labour as “quite staggering”.
In the final days of campaigning, the SNP, obviously anxious of the Greens eating into their regional vote, launched a massive SNP get-out-the-vote operation across Scotland.
Advertisement
Patrick Harvie’s party fought a second vote strategy — in the same way that Ruth Davidson did for the Conservatives.
A YouGov poll for The Times published yesterday put the SNP on 69 seats, the Conservatives on 24 and Labour on 21. It forecast nine Green MSPs and six Liberal Democrats. It came with a warning to Ms Sturgeon that she must use that mandate to govern, rather than pursue a second independence referendum.
When asked by YouGov to select up to three priorities from a list of policy areas, making the case for independence was second last in a list of 11. Health, jobs, schools, fighting austerity, reducing taxes, reducing crime and getting rid of the Trident nuclear weapons system were all more popular.