Brown: "The Future is Ours To Win" - McAvoy: "I'm Offski!"

It's surely embarrassing that as Gordon Brown was trying to turn this year's contest into a "Them" and "Us" election, blow as many dog-whistles as he can through the repeated use of buzzwords like "progressive" (remind me how well the 'dog-whistle' strategy did for Michael Howard?), while talking in his peroration of how the future belongs to Labour (a slightly creepy mantra, I feel), it's reported that Labour Whip Tommy McAvoy (Rutherglen & Hamilton West) has opted not to be a part of that future.

Now, McAvoy was blamed is some circles for Janis Hughes standing down as MSP for Glasgow Rutherglen, so I imagine she'll be pretty hacked off: all she needed to do was hang in there for three more years. And Iain Dale refers to the Jim Devine affair: Devine told Channel 4 that a Whip told him how to fiddle his expenses, and an internal inquiry has been launched into which member of the Whips' Office it was. Although we can't yet say for certain, it's not hard to join the dots: McAvoy is the likely candidate.

And now he's not a candidate at all.

Still, with March being pretty much ruled out as an election date (Brown may as well have stood there in Warwick and started singing Waiting at the Church as one of his predecessors did at the 1978 TUC Conference), Labour have around two month to find a candidate.

Surely, with time so short, and little or no time available to put an AWS in place, the likeliest figure is Tom McCabe, the former Finance Minister. McCabe is no longer on the Opposition frontbench at Holyrood (though he is Labour's representative on the Corporate Body) so while he's a big-hitter and it would be grim for Iain Gray to lose him as well, it won't be as embarrassing as losing yet another member of the Shadow Cabinet. It would, however, further drain the pool of talent open to Gray in the most important year of an Opposition's life: the year when it has to start looking like a Government. And no matter what optimistic Labour figures would say, when Labour MSPs start to opt for the Westminster back benches over the Holyrood front bench, as they have done, there is no way on Earth that those remaining can look like anything other than the "Second XI". They certainly can't look like a credible alternative government.

But I digress. McCabe is presently MSP for Hamilton South, which has an electorate overlap of around 31,000 with Rutherglen & Hamilton West (focusing mainly around Blantyre), so will know a decent sized part of the area, and was rumoured to be looking for selection to Airdrie & Shotts when it was announced that John Reid was standing down. He would, therefore, be the logical choice: in the short term, his move south creates a vacancy for the SPCB, which is neither earth-shattering nor a major blow, he's relatively local and he knows the area. And the new Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency at Holyrood - roughly analogous to Hamilton South - requires a Labour-SNP swing of 6.28% for it to be lost (especially tempting and achievable if, as is likely, the SNP candidate is a sitting Regional MSP and Tom McCabe seeks and wins the Rutherglen candidacy), while the Westminster seat requires either a 16% Lab-LibDem swing or a 21% Lab-SNP swing. McCabe would be daft not to go for it.

And that too is good news for the SNP: leaving aside the Dennis Canavan result (which, given his status as an Independent, defied swing projections), there have been four instances of a sitting Constituency MSP standing down and a Regional MSP from another party vying to take their place. The aforementioned Janis Hughes was one (Robert Brown of the LibDems stood in Rutherglen); the others being Susan Deacon in Edinburgh East & Musselburgh (where Kenny MacAskill was the SNP's challenger); Henry McLeish stood down from Central Fife in 2003 (the SNP's Tricia Marwick was seeking that one); and Ian Jenkins in Tweeddale, Ettrick & Lauderdale, standing down in 2003 (the SNP's Christine Grahame sought to succeed him). On average, the four Regional quasi-incumbents picked up a 'bonus' swing of 6.08%. That effect, if borne out in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, turns the seat into a supermarginal, before a single vote has been cast.