Alex Massie

Let's be honest, just for a moment. The Rochester and Strood by-election has been a disgrace. It has been a sewer race during which the two leading protagonists have done their best to demonstrate their lack of fitness for office. In this, if nothing else, they have been successful. I wouldn't expect anything better from Mark Reckless and Ukip. We know who they are; the type of people they are. So it's no great surprise that Reckless is happy to allow people to think Ukip's revolution will lead to the repatriation of immigrants. As usual, Ukip are living down to expectations. But so, alas, are the Conservatives. Their own candidate, Kelly Tolhurst, is just as repellent as Mr Reckless.

Here we go again. We last travelled down this road eight years ago. Then, as now, Hillary Clinton was laying the ground for a run to the White House. Then, as now, she presented herself as the inevitable candidate. So inevitable that it was scarcely worth anyone's time or effort to oppose her. Hillary was going to win and the Clintons have long memories. We know what happened next. It turned out there was an alternative after all. One, moreover, who had opposed the Iraq War and who enjoyed the only personal characteristics that could plausibly defeat Hillary's It's time for a woman candidacy. One who could ask America to move on from the Clinton-Bush era and begin afresh. And yet here we are again. Polls suggest it will be different this time.

A battle lost is worse than a battle won and there are fewer Pyrrhic victories in politics than you think. One of the staples of pre-election punditry, however, is that someone will always pipe up with the suggestion This is a Good Election to Lose. It is almost always bunk. Not least because, with the notable exception of the Liberal Democrats, major political parties are in the business of acquiring, then exercising, power. Shorn of that they lose their point. So there's that. Nevertheless if you suspect there might be a but lurking a couple of lines in the future your premonition would, in this instance, be correct. But this might actually be a rare exception to the general rule. This could be an election it really is better to lose than to win.

Alex Salmond is on his way out. The First Minister gives every impression of enjoying - or at least making the most of - his farewell tour. And why not? Far from weakening the SNP, defeat in September's referendum has - at least for now - strengthened the party. Its supremacy is unchallenged and while recent polls putting the Nationalists on 50 percent of the vote are unlikely - surely! - to last forever this is the kind of problem worth having. Nevertheless, the First Minister's final days in office have also reminded us that policy and, indeed, philosophy are not necessarily Salmond's strengths. Unusually, First Minister's Questions proved a useful exercise this week. Both Jackie Baillie, Labour's temporary head at Holyrood, and Ruth Davidson pressed Salmond on education.

A while back I was speaking at one of those How did it all go so wrong? post-referendum discussions and, as expected, the air was thick with recrimination. The good people of Glasgow - rebranded as Yes City - were unhappy and indignant. Eventually, however, talk turned to what might be done next. I made the suggestion that, just perhaps, Scotland's political and blethering classes might pay some attention to the powers the Scottish parliament currently enjoys. I mean, I said, it is not as though there are no big arguments to be had within the confines of Holyrood's truncated responsibilities. Not as though there are no large problems that needed fixing long ago. We were way past the point, I said, at which we could ignore the appalling reality of Scotland's apartheid education system.

Grotesque. Unbelievable. Bizarre. Unprecedented. Today's Ipsos-Mori opinion poll is the most astonishing survey of Scottish political opinion in living memory. Perhaps, even, the most remarkable survey of all time. It is, of course, a snapshot not a prediction. The actual election will not produce anything like these numbers. I don't believe the SNP will win 52% of the Scottish vote in May. I don't believe the Labour party will take 23% of votes. And I don't actually believe the Conservatives will only be supported by 10% of voters. Still, there is something happening in Scotland right now. The electorate is volatile. Just a month ago Survation reported Labour's support (amongst decided voters) at 39% and the SNP on 35%.

At the risk of intruding into someone else's calamity, if you can't enjoy this what can you enjoy? By this I mean, of course, Scottish Labour's meltdown. (Suggestions the party is not actually an iced lollipop should not be taken too seriously.) The thing to remember about Labour in Scotland is they've never been as popular as they like to think. They've only ever been the largest minority. A large and zombified minority, to be sure, but a minority nonetheless. They never - ever - spoke for a majority of Scots. They only claimed to. They still do. That's the astonishing thing. They are the people's army, the political will of the Scottish people made flesh. And how dare anyone else suggest otherwise. Inconveniently, a fair few folk have dared make just that suggestion. The bastards.

It was the wee things that did it. Things like vision, inspiration, confidence and all the other details that coalesce into that strange something called leadership. There are many types of leader and leadership is another of those things easier to see than define but all successful leaders share one essential quality: they can choose a hill and persuade their followers that's the place they must die. Johann Lamont never had a hill. By the end she didn't have much of an army either. Scottish Labour is a party suffering from some kind of political dementia right now. It kind of remembers being a contender and it still stands before a mirror shadowboxing but the moves are slower now and less convincing all the time.

This chart, courtesy of Mike Smithson, shows Ipsos-Mori's polling on British membership of the European Union. It shows support for leaving the EU is no higher now than it was 20 years ago. I'll wager this surprises you. As you can see, there has always been a constituency for leaving the EU. Public enthusiasm for the european project has always been conditional. Despite that, the unhappiness of a known known has generally proved more attractive than the uncertainty of a known unknown. (This, ahem, is also true of certain other constitutional questions with which we have wrestled recently.) But how can this be? How can UKIP be soaring in the polls even as public support for their greatest proposal sags?

It is a bold approach but, who knows, perhaps it is just crazy enough to work. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with a strategy on immigration best summarised like this: UKIP ARE RIGHT. DON'T VOTE FOR THEM. Thank heavens for Ed Miliband, eh? He's the Tories' last, best, weapon. What a cheery thought that is.

Thank heavens for Ed Miliband, eh? The leader of the opposition remains the single most compelling reason to hope the Conservatives remain in power next May. A shame, then, that cabinet ministers appear determined to promote the idea that a Labour victory would be garlanded with at least some silver promise. Chiefly, Chris Grayling would no longer serve as Justice Secretary. This is a non-trivial consideration that's worth pondering before anyone casts their ballot next May. There is some dispute over whether the Conservative's plans to rewrite Britain's human rights legislation can really deliver all they promise; some disagreement, therefore, over whether they're as dangerous as they initially appear. Is a half-baked nonsense worse than a fully-baked monstrosity?

Better than Miliband is as fine a demonstration of the soft bigotry of low expectations as you possibly hope to find. Nevertheless, David Cameron's speech to the Tory conference today was better than Miliband's chat in Manchester last week. Quite a lot better, in fact. It was almost, gosh, good. listen to ‘Podcast special: David Cameron's speech’ on audioBoom True, it's not altogether clear how the promised tax cuts - for ordinary and less ordinary hard workers alike - will actually be paid for and, in the context of speech that promised no unfunded tax cuts, this might ordinarily be seen as a small problem. Presumably they will be back-loaded to come into force once the national accounts are balanced in 2018. If they are balanced by 2018, that is.

It is easy to inflate the importance of speeches made at party conferences. Particularly when those speeches are the last such set piece events before a general election. But they are still, in the end and at bottom, a distillation of what matters most to a leader. A guide to his priorities; a demonstration of his faith. Somewhere along the line David Cameron has lost that faith. He was elected leader of the Tory party in desperate times and became Prime Minister in dismal times. In both instances he triumphed, at least in part, because he persuaded his audience that though he might look like a traditional Tory he was in fact a rather different type of Tory from those voters had grown fond of despising. Once upon a time, you see, David Cameron had a story to tell.

Doing nothing is always an option. Sometimes it can even be a sensible policy. There is much to be said for modesty and restraint and an awareness that unforeseen consequences lurk around every corner. Even so, doing nothing has consequences too. But the United Kingdom is not going to war in Iraq again. It is not going to war in Syria either. There are two parts to the battles against ISIS: an on-the-ground war and an in-the-air police action. We are, today's vote in the Commons permitting, taking part in the latter element of the battle. A punitive action designed to make it easier for those doing the real fighting - the Kurds and others - to prevail. So let's not exaggerate the military significance of deploying half a dozen jets to hit ISIS.

David Mundell, MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, is not often granted much respect. He is not a natural television performer, which does not help. He is a Scottish Conservative, which does not help either. But give him this: he predicted that the Scottish National Party would enjoy a surge of new members if Scotland voted No to independence. But what a surge it has been. The SNP has doubled its membership in a week. More than doubled it, in fact. The party now claims more than 60,000 paid-up members. To put this into some perspective, that's akin to a UK-wide party having 600,000 members. The combined membership of the Conservative and Labour parties is less than 400,000. Much less.