LABOUR was wrong. Walking into work the morning after the SNP victory I didn't see one single horseman of the apocalypse. Neither were there any plagues of locusts or rivers of blood or convoys of cars with suitcases strapped to the roof accelerating towards the English Border. It was a perfectly normal Saturday morning. A discarded kebab. A few hangovers. A very Scottish revolution.
In 1989, when the Scottish Constitutional Convention held its first meetings to press the case for home rule, one observer looked at the grey ranks of churchmen, trade unionists and council leaders and remarked how ordinary it all seemed. He was told
by a wiser colleague that this was precisely what made the convention such a powerful force.
Almost two decades on, Scotland's first SNP government is about to arrive, not with a bang, but with a bacon roll and a bottle of Irn-Bru. Scotland has changed, utterly, but we're unlikely to get overexcited about it. It's not in our nature. For the most part, Scottish voters have chosen the SNP simply because they fancy a bit more sparkle, a touch more swagger, in the way their country is run.
In Alex Salmond that's certainly what we're going to get. All of a sudden, government has personality. Jack McConnell is a good man who did some fine things for Scotland. (Memo to Alex: Why not set up an anti-sectarianism commission and ask Jack to chair it?) But McConnell was unable to impose his identity on the job. No such danger with Salmond. He will recast the First Minister's job as President of the Best Country in the World. (Expect the "wee" that usually comes before "country" to be airbrushed from this slogan within days of Salmond taking office.)
It's not the country at large that Salmond needs to worry about, for now at least. His problems lie closer to home. The one-seat majority he aims to put together with the Lib-Dems and the Greens hands enormous power to even the lowliest SNP backbencher. In every single vote, Salmond needs every single member of the SNP group to be punctual and obedient. The chances of that are minimal.
Yesterday morning, as Salmond surveyed the new group of Nationalist MSPs at their first meeting, I bet he experienced a small shudder of foreboding. After all, his party has an unfortunate and careless habit of losing MSPs along the way. In the first parliament, elected in 1999, the SNP group lost Margo MacDonald and Dorothy-Grace Elder, who became independents after falling out with the leadership. In the second parliament, elected in 2003, the SNP lost Campbell Martin, a persistent critic of then leader John Swinney.
These three rebels had something in common, besides a taste for belligerence. They were all firmly entrenched in the fundamentalist wing of the party.
Perhaps a word of explanation is necessary for those readers who are not sad enough to have taken an anorak-like interest in the minutiae of Nationalist politics for two decades.
The main faultline that runs down the middle of the SNP isn't between right-wingers and left-wingers. It is between the fundamentalists and the gradualists. For the fundamentalists, independence is the alpha and omega of SNP politics. For them, anything else - including governing happily in a devolved parliament - is a distraction from the historic route march to a more important destination. The gradualists, typified by Salmond, see the SNP more as "the power for change", accumulating more powers for Scotland and improving the country's lot, in the hope of maybe, some day, winning the ultimate prize.
The enmity between these two factions has, of late, been on a low gas. Not for much longer. In the ranks of the party's 2007 intake are perhaps a dozen fundamentalist MSPs who will see their main task as ensuring Salmond does not sell out the party's core principles and 'go native' with devolution.
Chief among them will be Bill Wilson, an IT expert with a PhD in the behaviour of field mice. No, really. It was Wilson who stood against John Swinney for the SNP leadership when Salmond stood down in 2003. Given that one of Salmond's first tasks will be to decide how much he can compromise on the key SNP policy of a referendum on independence, we could be hearing from Dr Wilson sooner rather than later.
When I interviewed him back in 2003, Wilson made clear he would rather have an SNP true to the independence dream and in opposition than one that compromised to win power. "There is no value in the SNP being in power if it is not going to deliver on anything that it is there for," he said. "Power is not an end, it is a means to deliver your core policies."
The grief this could cause Salmond cannot be underestimated. Not everyone in the SNP ranks is comfortable with the shedding of Nationalist nostrums to prove the party's worth in power. Not everyone will keep their mouth shut in the hope of a junior ministerial job. Not everyone is enamoured with the helicopters and 4 by 4s that Salmond has taken a liking to of late.
It just takes a couple of Nationalist MSPs to dig in their heels, and Salmond will be short of a majority in parliament. For Scotland's new leader, the powerplays are only just beginning.
