Almost an hour before Gordon Brown addressed his first Scottish Labour conference as prime minister, a vast queue began to form outside the main venue in the Highland resort of Aviemore, as its security system became jammed with human traffic.
Outside, the car park was stripped of all vehicles and surrounded by high metal fences. There was no mistaking the prime minister was close by. It was a far cry from the same scene six months earlier when Alex Salmond had sauntered up to the entrance of his first SNP conference as first minister, when there had been barely a policeman in sight.
There was an implicit political message in the operation: while Salmond is a wannabe national leader undeserving of such attention, Brown is the real deal.
His visit came at the end of a week in which he and Wendy Alexander, his protégée, could take pride. His speech to the conference, though lacklustre, appeared to go down well with the party faithful. Alexander, the Labour leader in Scotland, launched her constitutional commission into more powers for the Scottish parliament and had one of her better days at first minister's questions. She even had a dig about the first minister being booed by the Tartan Army at Hampden the night before, suggesting his popularity was on the slide.
Alex Salmond, in contrast had a rare off week, his proposals for a referendum on independence using the single-transferable vote system badly misfiring. This “Free by STV” approach, as it was dubbed, raised the theoretical possibility of Salmond claiming a mandate for independence on the back of 26% of voters ranking it as their first choice.
But Alexander and Brown need more than one good week to get them out of trouble. The reality is that the “People's Party” is doing its best impression of a swan. Despite apparent serenity on the surface, below the water line there is churning, panic and disarray.
Just how scared Labour are of Salmond and the SNP is revealed in a leaked account of a meeting between Brown and his closest aides on devolution. At the end of January, Brown met Des Browne, his Scottish secretary, Alistair Darling, his chancellor, and Jack Straw, the secretary of state for justice, who handles constitutional issues. An account of the meeting, seen by The Sunday Times, reveals that the prime minister believes that the advance of nationalists in the British Isles has become so great, he plans to mount a “Save the Union” campaign.
Far from being relaxed about the constitution and confident that independence will be rejected by Scottish voters, it suggests Brown and Alexander are afraid of the direction in which the country is travelling.
At the meeting, Brown said that it was important for all those who believed in the Union to become mobilised and to make their voices heard. He raised the issue of the abolition of student tuition fees north of the border for native students, while keeping them for English ones, and the Welsh Assembly voting not to fund Welsh patients using English hospitals, as examples of “emerging tensions”.
Designed to set out the case for the Union, and sway public attitudes, Brown's pro-Union campaign will involve business leaders, civic society, academia and politicians. Straw has been tasked to provide polling data on attitudes to the constitution across the United Kingdom.
The tone and content of the meeting betray the unmistakeable impression that the architects of devolution now recognise the scale of the problem that they have unleashed. The genie is out of the bottle and they are doing their best to force it back in.
The election of a minority nationalist government in Scotland was a shock to those in the Labour party who subscribed to George Robertson's oft quoted prediction that devolution would “kill nationalism stone dead”. As a Sunday Times poll published earlier this month revealed, being in office has strengthened the nationalists' hand.
The survey, by the pollsters MRUK Cello, showed support for the SNP in the Holyrood constituency vote up six points on last May at 39%, with Labour eight points behind on 31%, the Scottish Conservatives on 15% and the Scottish Liberal Democrats on 12%. In the regional vote, the SNP was on 40%, 10 points ahead of Labour, with the Tories on 13% and the Lib Dems on 11%.
If a vote for the Scottish parliament was held tomorrow, the nationalists would extend their lead from one to 13 seats. The poll showed that Alex Salmond is Scotland's most popular first minister yet, with an approval rating 75 points higher than Alexander. It also found that support for the nationalists at Westminster has doubled since the general election in 2005, with the SNP and Labour neck and neck on 34%.
Brian Wilson, the former Labour energy minister, summed up a growing opinion in the party that Alexander is mainly responsible for the slump of Labour and that another approach is needed to halt the nationalist advance. “Wendy Alexander is very much part of the presiding influences in Labour politics over the past 20 years in Scotland who have decided politics is really about constitutions and commissions and the more you set up the better life must be,” he said.
“As long as Labour continues to go down what is essentially a nationalist agenda, the outcome is pretty preditable - the beneficiaries will be the nationalists. I fail to understand why the people who've created Labour's difficulty in Scotland learn nothing. They just keep on making the same mistakes.”
In bars and coffee shops at the conference, the problems besetting Labour are not hard to find. “Wendy Alexander is simply bad for the party,” said one activist. “She's bright, but she's a wonk, an academic. She doesn't understand what drives ordinary people and what stirs them. The bottom line - she's not a politician.”
A donor to Alexander's leadership campaign denounced her commission as “appeasement” of the SNP. Baron Moonie of Kirkcaldy, a former defence minister who gave £500 to Alexander last year, said that instead of proposing big changes, she ought to be trying to stabilise the current devolution settlement. “This policy of appeasement, Chamberlain tried it in the 1930s. It didn't work. It ain't going to work now,” he said.
“You are either in favour of independence or you are in favour of the Union. It is a very difficult road you're going once you start altering the deal that was made at devolution. That's the slow creep towards independence.” He said Alexander, Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie and LibDem leader Nicol Stephen had let themselves be dragged into a debate in which Alex Salmond, the first minister, called the tune.
Jim McCabe leader of North Lanarkshire council and head of the Labour group on the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, said Alexander had to drop her “superior
attitude” and listen to the party's grassroots.
In contrast to Alexander's perceived obsession with constitutional minutiae, Salmond combines the roles of competent political manager and flamboyant ideological grandstander, grabbing headlines with gestures such as demanding the saltire fly above the Union Jack at public buildings and seeking a .sco website domain for the country. Even when he is criticised, as he was over his involvement in planning applications by the US millionaire Donald Trump and the SNP donor Donald Macdonald, he explains it away as doing what is best for Scotland.
While support for independence remains stuck at about 23%, a recent Sunday Times poll, run by MRUK Cello, showed public opinion on the matter was volatile and that a majority of Scots would be prepared to back separatism in certain circumstances, for example, if a Tory government was elected at Westminster.
No matter how hard she tries, Alexander seems unable to hold the initiative. Her good week at Holyrood was undermined on the first day of conference when she awarded herself a “10 out of 10” rating on her first six months as leader. An e-mail from her spin doctor Simon Pia in advance of her speech yesterday suggested she should model herself on Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy.
“The 10 out of 10 thing was a catastrophic error,” said one party insider. “She should be going back to basics, not borrowing stuff from JFK. I don't think even Alex Salmond has the balls to steal from JFK.”
For Moonie, the best tactic for Alexander is to hold tight, not panic, and wait out the storm until the 2011 elections.But by then, Brown may be out of power in Westminster, support for independence may be on the rise in reaction to David Cameron, and Alexander will have had her chance and blown it.
For all its gaffes and inadequacies, Aviemore 2008 may turn out to be one of Alexander's better years.
NuLabour created the surge in nationalist opinion with it's botched devolution package and Gordon Brown is not the man needed to put the nationalist genie back into the bottle. He has no ideas; no vision; and no charisma. He cannot articulate a policy so that it appeals to the electorate and he is only Prime Minister because Tony Blair promised that he would serve a full third term and then was forced out of office.
In England, Brown is an unpopular Scottish PM, presiding over a Government in which Scots are over-represented. Whilst more devolution is being considered for Scotland, the 'West Lothian question' is not being addressed in any form and is fuelling English nationalism. Until Brown addresses the discrepancy NuLabour created by allowing MPs from devolved constituencies to vote on English matters, he hasn't a hope of tackling the nationalist agenda - in Scotland or England.
Donna Walker, Effingham, Surrey