In August last year, I spoke to Kezia Dugdale just before she was elected as the new leader of Scottish Labour – the sixth in eighth years. Her greatest challenge, she told me, was to answer a simple question: what is the point of Labour? “There were 160 different policies in our manifesto in Scotland . . . 160 policies and nobody knew what we were for.”
Eight months later, Dugdale faces the prospect that Labour – for so long the dominant force in Scottish politics – could come third in tomorrow’s Holyrood elections behind the SNP and the Conservatives. No one expected the party’s revival to be swift, but if it does trail behind the Tories, the biggest factor that will save her job is that no one else wants it.
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