As supporters cheered her victory in the Glasgow Southside constituency she calls home, Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction was understated. She allowed herself just a little smile of acknowledgment. As personal mandates go, she had something bigger in her sights.
What the SNP leader was seeking in the early hours of Friday morning was her first personal mandate to lead the country. Since inheriting the first ministership of Scotland after the independence referendum she had been governing on the mandate achieved by her predecessor, Alex Salmond, in 2011. Now she wanted one of her own. By late Friday morning that personal mandate had been won — but it was less powerful than the one she had been wielding for the past 17 months.
On a Holyrood election night full of unexpected drama, the SNP had won an unprecedented third term in government. Yet they had also been taken down a peg or two by the Scottish electorate.
They had been denied the absolute power of an absolute majority. Scottish politics had reshaped itself into a new and more varied design. And in this new landscape there were big winners and big losers. At an election count it is usually pretty clear from the sifting of the very first ballots how well a party has done. Good manners dictates you wait until the results are fully known before apportioning credit or blame.
No one seemed to have told Thomas Docherty at the Mid Scotland and Fife count. Before a single result was declared last night, the defeated Labour MP who was seeking a bolthole in Holyrood, gave an incendiary interview to the BBC. Having realised his party was set for a hiding, Mr Docherty turned on his own party’s strategists. Attacking Scottish Labour’s tax-raising measures, he made a comparison with Labour’s hard-left manifesto at the 1983 UK general election, famously described as the “longest suicide note in history”. Labour’s manifesto for this Holyrood election was, he said, more like “self-immolation for dummies”.
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When one senior Labour party member in Edinburgh was informed about Mr Docherty’s intemperate outburst, his reaction
was blunt: “He’s an a**e.” The worst night ever for Scottish Labour, reducing its MSP count to less than half of its 2003 tally, was a hard one to bear for many activists.
One veteran Labour campaigner, with an over-sized scarlet rosette welded to his chest, battled to keep a stiff upper lip at the Glasgow count.
When the result from Rutherglen beamed up on a big screen, revealing an 11 per cent slump in his party’s fortunes, it proved too much for him. He left the room with a face like a vegan treated to a meal at Nando’s, a gaggle of disgruntled comrades trailing in his wake.
One senior Labour figure, who refused to flee, gave an apocalyptic interpretation of his party’s fortunes. “Tonight is a disaster,” he winced. “But the worst thing is that we haven’t even hit rock bottom yet.”
One activist was jaw-droppingly candid when quizzed on how Labour could win back voters in its once impregnable heartland. “I think we’d have to waterboard the f***ers,” he hissed before sloping off into the night.
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It was a good night for the Lib Dems, who some polls had predicted would be reduced to a single MSP. In Orkney, defying expectations of an SNP gain, Liam McArthur held his seat with a majority of more than 4,000. Willie Rennie, the party leader, who had been filmed earlier in the campaign in front of two copulating pigs, also saved his bacon.
Over in Edinburgh, the leaders of the two parties that had been vying for second place arrived at the Royal Highland Showground about 3am. They appeared in quick succession, striding in hand-in-hand with their partners. But while Ruth Davidson was beaming, there was a desperation to the way Kezia Dugdale made a beeline for Daniel Johnson, who had just won an unexpected victory for Labour in Edinburgh Southern.
Ms Dugdale grabbed hold of his hand, clinging onto the one scrap of victory for the cameras. “Here, look, everybody — it isn’t all that bad,” her gesture seemed to say.
When Ms Davidson’s shock victory in Edinburgh Central was announced, jubilant Tory activists took up a chant of “Ruth, Ruth, Ruth”. Their leader quickly cut them off with a wave of the hand and an admonishing look. Her campaign may have been a cult of personality, but the campaign was over.
There was little love lost at the Edinburgh count between the SNP and the Greens, formerly partners in the independence campaign. Some activists in yellow rosettes suggested to Alison Johnstone, the Green MSP, that her candidacy in Edinburgh Central had handed the seat to the Tories. The atmosphere was frosty.
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By the end of the night, when regional results presented the Conservatives with even more prizes, true-blue activists could hardly believe it. “That can’t be right?” one exclaimed when shown a piece of paper giving them three Lothian regional MSPs.
It was a bittersweet moment for Iain McGill, a perpetual candidate beaten to Holyrood again after his ranking on the Tory list had been decided by the cut of a deck of cards. Yet he was as jubilant as the rest of his fellow Tories, and struggled to remember what card he drew. “I think it was the five of diamonds?”
Mishaps are only to be expected in such a complex election process, and in the Orkney count the presiding officer managed to multiply the Labour candidate’s vote by ten. On BBC Scotland’s election coverage a new-fangled graphics system got the better of Brian Taylor, the broadcaster’s political editor, and he appeared to storm off the set in disgust.
As the results stacked up, the key question of the night became whether the Nationalists would achieve another majority. It would come down to whether their extra tally on the North East regional list was one MSP or two. Two would not give them a majority, but it would give them half of the parliament and made it hard for an SNP government to be outvoted. When the result came through mid-morning on Friday, the voters’ verdict was another bumper crop of Tory MSPs and one solitary Nat. It was not enough.
As the full implications began to be digested, it became an election of “what ifs”. Someone pointed out that if only 359 people had switched to the SNP in Dumbarton and Edinburgh Central the Nationalists would have won a majority. How many extra door knocks, licked envelopes or window posters might have delivered those votes? For the SNP the thought was agonising, but ultimately futile.
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The people of Scotland had spoken. And their word was final.