The worst possible start for Brown

I started the day unsure that the political landscape had changed but 12 hours is a long time in politics. Few moments deserve to be called historic, but the fall of Scotland to the SNP is amongst them. In theory this brings Scottish independence closer than at any time since the Home Rule Bill of 1913. But its greater significance is personal. However he wriggles and squirms, Gordon Brown cannot escape the tartan brush with which he has just been rudely tarred. Scotland was meant to be his fiefdom and it has fallen out of Labour hands – just as Dunfermline and West Fife, which Labour lost in a by-election in February 2006, was meant to be Mr Brown’s back-yard. Could there be a worse way to begin a premiership?