The late Leonard Cohen’s last album You Want It Darker was praised as “a bleak masterpiece for hard times” — an appropriate epitaph perhaps for the year gone by.
It was Clinton when I went to bed, and Trump when I woke in the morning — and it was a similar story with Brexit. The polls, the bookies and the experts had mostly said Remain, but the Leave voters in forgotten parts of the country confounded them. Yet before bed Farage had conceded defeat. There is a text on my phone from a leading Scottish Leaver: “High turnout,” it reads, “I think we’re stuffed.”
Scotland and Northern Ireland were to vote differently from England and Wales, but the margin was closer than either side had predicted. Both Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson played leading roles, but there was no serious engagement on the ground from either side, with activists exhausted after so many campaigns and Leavers virtually absent from the fray.
The SNPs lean mean election machine was never really deployed, and the party spent only £90,000 on the campaign. And afterwards, in truth, nobody was really prepared for the Brexit bombshell.
The first minister, in the first flush of defeat, declared “a highly likely” referendum, increasing expectations and leading her troops to the top of the hill. However, it is a long and winding road from that declaration to a second independence vote. The much-anticipated indy bounce has not materialised and the view set out by SNP MSP Alex Neil that there should not be a second referendum until a Brexit deal is sealed is gathering pace in nationalist ranks.
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On a future Scottish poll, the Conservatives say they are not complacent, but it is clear they are older and wiser than last time. They know they cannot stop a second poll, but they can influence the question asked and when it takes place.
The Scottish Brexit minister Michael Russell has worked hard on the case for a single market, and to build bridges across the devolved administrations and in Europe. Theresa May’s government has yet to embrace the case. He has also turned his gaze on territory the Scottish secretary has staked out — on more powers for Holyrood. David Mundell is open for business on this and is ready to talk.
Seven weeks before the Brexit vote there was a political earthquake of a different sort. It was a short walk from the Premier Inn to the Highland Hall at Ingliston and the Edinburgh count. As Ruth Davidson, her partner Jen Wilson, and communications chief Eddie Barnes stepped into the midnight gloom on that mild night of May 5, it was looking good — 22 or 23 MSPs were on the cards. They had a lingering fear, in a party accustomed to disappointment, that their expectations could yet be dashed. Slowed on arrival by a throng of photographers and jostling hacks, they finally reached the count. “You could be second,” she was told; then, “It might be a recount”; and, 15 minutes later, “we think you might have won”.
“Winning Edinburgh Central was not in the script,” Barnes said. “We hadn’t given winning a second’s thought. We didn’t have a speech for that.” And it fell to him to say they had better get writing.
They won 31 MSPs on the night — their best-ever showing at Holyrood and eclipsing Labour as the biggest opposition party. Davidson, the self-described “short-haired, flat-shoed, shovel-faced lesbian” had defied decades of decay and revived and reinvented the Scottish Tory brand.
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The SNP, meanwhile, boasting an unprecedented majority from 2011, fell short. Since her coronation in 2014 Nicola Sturgeon had been the mistress of all she surveyed. This election was important to her, her first electoral mandate as first minister. She recorded a historic victory — but somehow, losing the overall majority, it had a hollow ring.
With her husband Peter Murrell, chief executive of the SNP and master of electoral alchemy, at the campaign helm — and a massive army of boots on the ground — they failed to achieve what Alex Salmond had in 2011. That said, it is nothing short of remarkable that after so long in office the SNP’s popularity and Sturgeon’s personal ratings stand where they do. The Teflon might be tarnished, it may even be scratched, but it hasn’t come off.
Big challenges lie ahead for the “rampant lioness”, as she was dubbed by an adoring cub last week. Some ministers in her pride seem not quite up to the mark. Even her most respected lieutenant John Swinney is finding his new job difficult. With a trusted reputation for competence, built steadily over years, and in his previous role as finance secretary, Swinney has been a rock on which the SNP’s fortune has been built. With his move another cornerstone has gone, his council tax freeze, which served the party well since 2007. The repercussions have yet to be felt.
His shift to education reflects the importance the first minister attaches to the brief. But this portfolio would try the patience of a saint. His predecessors have done him no favours — with their timidity in taking on vested interests, and leaving him an in-tray of long-standing and deep-rooted problems. He had an inauspicious start — the climbdown on the named persons initiative was a baptism of fire. With a mountain to climb on attainment, and further and higher education under strain, he does not have his troubles to seek.
A landmark was reached with the devolution of new tax powers. Higher earners in Scotland will pay more in income tax than in the rest of the UK. Much to its short-term embarrassment, however, the Scottish government was criticised for taking the power to regulate but not to run until 2020 some of the new social security system in Scotland.
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Arguably the most successful SNP politician this year is at Westminster — Angus Robertson, the newly crowned deputy. His performances in the Commons, where he has been dubbed the real leader of the opposition, have been a revelation. He has grown in both stature and authority, and won respect on both sides of the House while others in opposition have floundered. Robertson has managed a potentially tricky relationship with his old boss, Salmond, and has galvanised the new intake of SNP MPs.
For Labour this has been a year of decline, disorder and disaster. New members carried Corbyn to victory again,though he wasn’t first choice for leadership voters in Scotland. The party is irreconcilably split, paranoid about each other and languishing in the polls. If that is the picture that engulfs Corbyn, there is equivalent disarray in Scotland.
Kezia Dugdale is unable to break through in a crowded field where two, more talented women lead the way. Prospects for Scottish Labour in the council elections look grim. Will Dugdale stay? Her critics are circling and this time they think they have options.
Lest we forget, in this year of unpredictability and uncertainty, there was some good cheer around too. It was a year of coming out.
“Having taken one of the most important decisions of my life and resolved to come out publicly as gay in 2016, I just want to get on with it, and now, just like that, I have said it. How can it be both so easy and so hard to say a few short words?” With that, Mundell, the lone Tory representing a Scottish constituency at Westminster, became the first openly gay man in a Tory cabinet. And later in the year Dugdale came out too.
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Finally, the biggest surprise of the political year brought a man with a Scottish mum to the White House. Let us look forward to his next visit to the home of his ancestors — and his critics queuing up to be first to shake his hand.