A campaign full of surprises, and still with all to play for

ONLY one week to go in an election that has upset everyone’s expectations, mine included. According to YouGov, the Tories could actually be in line to lose seats next week after a campaign that was supposed to be a walk-over, a coronation, an anointing of St Theresa of Brexit. The PM’s much-derided claim that she was “too busy thinking about Brexit” to bother appearing in last night’s leader’s debate may prove to be her epitaph.

Of course, no one really believes opinion polls any more – not even the opinion pollsters. Dig a little deeper and the Conservatives could still be in line for a very comfortable majority according to ComRes and ICM. And no one should underestimate Labour’s capacity for shooting itself in the foot – as in Jeremy Corbyn not knowing the cost of his child care policy in an interview with, of all people, the presenter of Woman’s Hour. Of course, politicians can’t be expected to know all the numbers, but you’d have thought, after the Diane Abbott debacle on the police, he’d have checked the cost of that day’s headline policy.

But even though he gets his numbers wrong, Mr Corbyn remains the unlikely star of this election. He has provided great TV in the British underdog tradition. Jeremy shambles onto the stage, like a dowdy Susan Boyle on X Factor, and then suddenly finds his voice and wins over a sceptical audience. Well, maybe… the Tories are still going to win in the final.

Indeed, the people most worried by Corbyn-mania are not the Tories, but all those “moderate” Labour MPs who were confidently expecting their leader to fail disastrously. There’s even a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that the evil Tory press has been talking up Jezza’s prospects in order to ensure that he won’t be removed as Labour leader in the expected post-election coup.

But imagine if Labour had had a more credible leader in this election – or even if Labour MPs had actually supported their existing one? It’s clear from the success of the Labour manifesto, that this was an election Labour could and should have won.

Mr Corbyn is actually a very British phenomenon, with his love of allotments and manhole covers. We love eccentrics, and he’s conveyed a sense of authenticity that chimes with the popular mood of revulsion at elite politics. But that’s water under the bridge now. Labourites like the candidate for East Renfewshire, Blair McDougall, fatally undermined their own party’s election prospects by saying their leader was “unfit to lead”.

The SNP was also getting a little anxious about the Corbyn surge.

The Nationalists were taken by surprise at the popularity of

Labour’s manifesto, even though many of the policies like elderly care tuition, fees and school meals are already implemented north of the Border. It has reminded them that it’s actually quite hard to sell an SNP vote in a Westminster election, because there is no possibility of the SNP forming a UK Government. Such was the scale of the 2015 tsunami that SNP supporters rather forgot that in 2010 the party only returned six Westminster seats out of 59.

If Labour had been more united in Scotland, then Kezia Dugdale might have been looking at a raft of Labour seats returning to the fold. Instead many Labour voters seem to be toying with voting for Ruth Davidson’s Tories on the ground that they are the best way to halt a second independence referendum. The SNP has been surprised by the intense, but wholly predictable, reaction against a second referendum. They were banking on making this General Election about Brexit and the Tories, not indyref2.

Nicola Sturgeon has had to go back to basics and appeal to her more ardent Nationalist followers by announcing that, contrary to what she has been saying all along, this election is actually about independence – about ensuring a “triple lock” mandate, whatever that is.

This is a confusing message, especially when tagged to a tactical retreat on the timing of an independence referendum. The SNP leader now appears to accept that it should come at the “end of the Brexit process”, which could be anything up to 10 years.

The dog that hasn’t barked in this election so far has been Europe. Ms Sturgeon hoped that her opposition to hard Brexit, and her attempts to keep Scotland in the single market, would have given the nationalists a chance to widen their support base. After all, even Jeremy Corbyn has thrown in the towel. But the issue has hardly figured so far, even though Theresa May said that Brexit was the very reason this general election was called in the first place.

We keep being told that the Tories are going to return to Brexit in the final week’s campaigning. This may give the First Minister an opportunity to appeal to Scottish voters appalled by the thought of their future being negotiated by the likes of Boris Johnson and David Davis. But it may equally be the case that many voters don’t really care whether Scotland is in or out of the EU.

Given the huge implications for jobs, universities, freedom of movement, even security after Manchester, it is surprising that Scottish voters seem to be relatively unperturbed at the prospect of Scotland being taken out of the EU against its will. The whole issue of Holyrood’s likely status after Brexit – the threat to its powers as responsibilities repatriated from Brussels are seized by Westminster – has hardly registered in the campaign so far.

The SNP is still on course to win this election in Scotland, and return more MPs than all three Unionist parties together. But the party’s problem throughout has been managing expectations – preventing the inevitable setback looking like a defeat.

If the party were to lose prominent figures such as its Westminster leader, Angus Robertson – who significantly was chosen to stand in for Ms Sturgeon in last night’s TV debate – then it would look like a huge blow. The Tories are sounding very optimistic about taking his Moray seat, and many others. Labour and the Liberal Democrats will probably gain seats too. If all that happens, it might be that this election, far from being the trigger for an early independence referendum, really does put a second independence referendum off for a generation.

If Labour had been more united in Scotland, then Kezia Dugdale might have been looking at a raft of seats returning to the fold