We were promised razzamatazz. Alex Salmond was going to take the jacket off and get stuck in. With only two weeks to go, he claimed he had hardly started to fight. His challenge to the media was whether they could keep up with him. But the razzamatazz has been limited to a gritty, five-minute speech by Scotland's and the party's favourite son, Sean Connery, delivered to a small, invited audience of party activists in a drab lecture theatre. The jacket has stayed on. And the media has not only kept up with Salmond but tormented him daily with their prognosis for a poor nationalist second place at Thursday's election. If the consistent poll evidence is correct, these historic elections for the first Scottish parliament since 1707 will see the governing Labour Party emerge as the biggest party.
It seems Scotland's independence bubble has burst, and not for the first time. When the nationalists start to tear lumps out of each other in the early hours of Friday morning (the jackets will surely be off then), Salmond's detractors will point out that he has promised a breakthrough at three elections since he became leader in 1990, and failed to deliver. Some say he got his tactics all wrong. The fundamentalists in the party say he shouldn't have had any truck with the half-way house of the Labour government's devolution plans, keeping Scotland in the UK.
Others say he has blown it by switching strategy abruptly and at a late stage, by moving off the ground at which Labour was always weaker. Since spring last year the SNP was Scotland's Party for Scotland's Parliament, in contrast with London Labour. Then, without any advance planning, early March saw the SNP shift to a campaign arguing for higher tax in return for better public services.
Others again see his downfall as an official broadcast five days after the Balkan bombing began, in which he attacked the strategy as unpardonable folly - a phrase that may soon boomerang back in his direction. Most of those polled say the SNP's opposition to the war won't sway their voting, but in gung-ho Blairite Britain it has put a question mark over Salmond's judgment.
Yet perhaps it's not Alex Salmond's fault at all that his party's showing in opinion polls has gone into free fall. Perhaps it is better summed up by a phrase coined by one of his fiercest critics within the SNP, Jim Sillars. On being dumped by Glasgow electors in 1992, this firebrand flounced off the political stage, complaining that his football-crazed compatriots were just a bunch of 90-minute nationalists.
So when the blue shirts come off at the end of the match, what is left? A lack of guts, perhaps. Scotland too often struggles to find confidence in itself, and the pro-UK rhetoric has a habit of reinforcing that nagging feeling that the country cannot quite hack it on its own. To that end, Salmond has made so much of Ireland's Celtic Tiger/independence in Europe example that Dublin should give him a medal in recognition of his enthusiastic praise while dealing with the world's media.
Or perhaps it is something closer to self-interest. Economically, the case that the UK works in Scotland's favour is strong - though contested. Its workplaces are outward-looking, most often selling to English markets. Spending per head of population is much higher than in England. There is a significant gap in Scotland's favour between tax take and spending. The UK's north-south gap has narrowed markedly.
THE union also offers Scots something to blame, and without the English to grumble about, Scotland would be lost for a bogeyman. That culture of giving London a kicking was emphasised over 18 Conservative years. The Scots had a radical government with no Scottish mandate. Scottish voters learned before the English how tactical voting could be used with devastating effect to oust Conservatives, so that two years ago, there were none left at all.
It is that contrary culture that has been toughest for Labour to deal with in its two years in government. Scots, especially Labour activists, were unhappy with the Blairite right-ward drift, and the SNP prospered due to Labour in-fighting and the well-founded impression that all Labour's shots were being called from London. The nationalists did well on disillusion or unhappiness with Labour in power.
What Labour had to do was to persuade its people that this election was not about giving it a mid-term kick. The government put its defences in place and instituted a two-year programme of action. But to stop the SNP momentum, the government had to go negative.
That is why it has been relentless in its messages about the costs of divorce; new revenue and welfare systems, defence forces, currency, diplomatic service. Its estimates of the costs ranged wildly, from £2 billion to £4 billion.
Perversely, Labour has been fighting the election on the question of independence, which it does not want, while the SNP has been fighting it on the basis of devolved home rule, which it does not believe in. In other words, the nationalists have realised that nationalism is not a vote-winner. Of 10 election pledges, an independence referendum is the tenth.
The economic case for it was deemed enough of a liability that it was held back until last Friday. Labour knows that weak point and punished its opponents for it.
The more Labour has highlighted independence, the less attractive it has become. A poll in the Sunday Times two days ago showed merely 25 per cent of voters who would back it in the referendum Alex Salmond wants to hold within the next four years, whereas in the past year it has hovered around a majority.
So perhaps the nationalist bubble has not burst. It may have never been there - the SNP's support being merely a sign of Scotland's protesting political culture. Even the SNP leadership privately admits there is a long way to go before Scots believe it is in their self-interest to split from the UK.
And that is why this week, even before Scots go to the polls, Alex Salmond has already begun the campaign for May 2003.
