Oh, am I relieved, pt 1

Less of the personal, more of the political. And oh, how my old student self would cringe at that statement.

Just after I boarded a train on Tuesday for my flying visit to Huddersfield to join GBS in watching the Electoral College votes come in for BO, apparently the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, was spotted on our street.

Now (a little wry nod to Steve Jay here) the significance of this will be lost on non-Brit readers. No, he wasn't doing a swift immigration check - but the fact that I'd just that minute been popped on a train South Of The Border would have helped if that had been the case.

No - I'd just managed to parachute myself into by-election territory - and this had some potential for mischief.

Back in the summer, the Scottish National Party had scored a major upset on the back of what I would call mediocre economic news. It was nowhere near the meltdown we suffered later, but just scary enough for people to cause problems for the government without it being so bad as to make a "we should all pull together" call. One of the safest Labour seats in the country, Glasgow East had turned SNP with a viciousness that took even the London press pack by surprise. So, bad news for our Prime Minister (a man I have enormous sympathy for, by the way).

Now, you can imagine that, when the seat of Glenrothes fell vacant after the death of sitting MP John MacDougall, the news media salivated. After all, Glenrothes had nowhere near the Labour majority that Glasgow East had - so this was potentially a ripe picking for the SNP.

Basically, should Labour have lost this seat, Labour back-benchers, let alone The Daily Mail, would have been baying for Gordon Brown's blood.

The scenes in the town in the last few days were a tad surreal -I witnessed television interviews with the candidates amongst the shops in the Kingdom Centre, where carefully-planned policies would be reduced to five-second soundbites while advisers muttered shadily into cellphones just out of the camera's gaze, like a real-life version of The Thick Of It. I saw swarms of activists in the town's estates leafleting like fury. Incidentally, you could tell Labour swarms by the sound they made before the rosettes came into view - the mix of British regional accents gave the game away: after all, what Welshman in his right mind joins the SNP? To add to the tension, the SNP had brought out a big dog for the campaign - Fife Council leader Peter Grant was their candidate.

All in the end was well. Although the SNP cut Labour's majority by half, Labour actually polled MORE votes than in the 2005 General Election, and won by an unexpectedly large majority considering the appalling expectations. Basically, the SNP gambled the farm and lost. Boo-hoo for them.

I should say that I have a highly ambivalent attitude to by-elections. They seem less about local issues and more about one party trying to put one over on a rival on the national stage. It means that, although the attention the constituency gets is flattering, the politicians have bugger-all interest in that constituency in the grander scheme of things.

Indeed that is the case. Labour have held Glenrothes, the US have their first African-American president and the dust is settling. Come the weekend, there'll be one last set of analysis in the heavyweight papers and the comment programmes on the telly; and then we can all get on with moaning about our pissy little lives.

Well, not mine - but you know what I mean. And, if you'll excuse me, I have to let a cat in.