Fourteen months after Labour's landmark general election victory in Britain, Tony Blair's government is breaking all popularity records. A London poll this week showed its approval ratings topping 50 per cent - higher than when it came to power.
But 14 months on in Scotland, the story is completely different. Mr Blair's government is trailing the Scottish National Party by a record 14 points and a near paralysis is gripping a bewildered Labour Party. What on earth is going on north of the border?
When Mr Blair entered Downing Street he promptly set about keeping his promise to offer the Scots (and the Welsh) home rule. This was what his late Scottish predecessor, John Smith, had called "unfinished business" and the prime minister was as good as his word.
He appointed Smith's life-long friend and political soulmate Mr Donald Dewar as Secretary of State for Scotland and within 18 weeks Mr Dewar steered Labour and its pro-devolution allies to a famous win in a referendum, with Scots voting three-one in favour for their own strongly decentralised parliament in Edinburgh.
Though Mr Blair, with his preoccupations with Middle England, was suspected of being cool on the whole idea of loosening Scotland's constitutional ties with England, he accepted the argument of Mr Dewar that the United Kingdom would be strengthened, not weakened, by a self-governing Scotland.
Mr George Robertson, another Scot, whom Mr Blair appointed Defence Secretary, used a neat phrase which has since returned to haunt him. "A Scottish parliament will kill the SNP stone dead," he predicted. But the Scottish people are rewriting the script.
This week's stunning poll by System Three in the Herald not only gave the Scottish Nationalists their record lead, it followed two other polls suggesting that more than half the Scottish electorate now favours independence. Across the country, even in Labour's central-belt urban fiefdoms, the story is the same: voters are turning away from Labour in droves.
A string of miserable local byelection defeats has left Labour baffled and wrongfooted. No-one in the Labour Party can fully explain why so much is going so wrong so soon after Mr Dewar was exulting in almost hero status less than a year ago.
Some reasons are fairly obvious. Labour controls most of Scotland's local government, and has done for years during which complacency and corruption have become rooted. A series of scandals has damaged the party. In national politics two west of Scotland MPs are suspended by the party.
And then there was the affair of Sean Connery's lost knighthood. Mr Connery, a Scots folk hero for his exploits as James Bond, supports the SNP, to whom he gives almost £5,000 a month. Mr Dewar and other Labour ministers were happy enough to pose with him in photocalls and to use his celebrity support for a Yes vote in the Referendum. When the result was in the bag the same ministers were exposed cancelling Connery's knighthood proposed by the departing Tories.
Worse, instead of holding up their hands and saying sorry, the government tried to blacken Connery as a woman-beater and tax exile. Not long afterwards, the SNP's opinion poll lead began to stretch.
As if all that were not enough the party is now engaged in an internal war over candidate selections for the Scottish Parliament amid allegations that the Blairites are culling free spirits in its nationalist wing and the old left.
But these mishaps are not the whole story. More significant is the fact that in England there is no opposition to speak of. In Scotland (and Wales) there are no Tory MPs left to despise, and therefore the job of opposition has passed to the Nationalists, who are glorying in their work.
Even then there must be more to what looks ever more likely to be the start of a sea change in Scottish politics. Labour is being forced to think the unthinkable: that instead of home rule killing the forces of separatism stone dead, it is pouring petrol on the flames of nationalism.
The SNP leader, Mr Alex Salmond, easily the best political debater in Scottish politics, goes around the country arguing that a natural process is at work. "It is logical that when the Scots taste a measure of freedom they will want more of it," he believes.
Put another way, Labour's delivery of home rule appears to have opened the floodgates with consequences which could sweep away the union with England after almost three centuries and leave Scotland as an independent country. The Tories, who bitterly fought a rearguard action to block home rule, warned this would happen. The SNP prayed it would happen and Labour and their Liberal Democrat allies during the earlier years of plotting devolution's course appear now to be in danger of making it happen unwittingly.
There is emotive talk from the SNP's enemies about The End of Britain and the destruction of the United Kingdom. Poor Donald Dewar - a decent, courteous and intelligent Labour thinker who is genuinely respected across parties - seems unable to cope with events. A political street fighter he is not. Those beseeching him to put the boot into the SNP are wasting their time.
Labour now has only 10 months left in which to regain lost ground before voting for the first Scottish parliament in almost 300 years. Polls suggest if the contest were held tomorrow the Nationalists would be the largest party in the new, £50 million chamber at Holyrood, putting them within a whisker of an overall majority.
They are sworn - in the event of forming a Scottish government - to call a referendum on independence within four years and that way lies the biggest constitutional upheaval in Britain since Britain was invented.
Murray Ritchie is Scottish Political Editor of the Herald, Glasgow.