Glasgow Cathcart by-election 2005

'Labour's new MSP Charlie Gordon will take up his post this week amid speculation that he will be offered a quick passage into McConnell's ministerial circle. However, fellow Labour MSPs warned that Gordon should serve his time first before being promoted ahead of fellow colleagues. One said: "My advice to Jack would be that there are plenty of people who have been very loyal to him and who are more deserving of a post first.' Eddie Barnes, Political Editor in Scotland on Sunday, 2 nd October 2005.

Salmond blamed for 'taking eye off the ball' as SNP fails to win

By Eddie Barnes, Political Editor in Scotland on Sunday 2 nd October 2005

ALEX Salmond is coming under attack from within the SNP over the party's failure to win last week's Cathcart by-election.

Labour held on to the seat despite the scandal of former MSP Mike Watson's fire-raising conviction.

Leading Nationalists believed that Watson's downfall provided the party with a major opportunity to break into Labour's heartlands.

Yet while the SNP vote rose, Labour candidate Charlie Gordon, the former leader of Glasgow City Council, still won comfortably.

SNP insiders have laid the blame squarely on party chiefs who, they claim, failed to prepare properly for the election.

They say little was done to mobilise support in the constituency in the months leading up to the poll.

One insider said: "There was a complete lack of foresight about this election from HQ. By-elections are usually always run from the party headquarters. In this case there was no audit of the constituency in terms of the strengths and weaknesses we had. Basically HQ had their eye off the ball."

Another source said: "We have known that there was going to be a by-election for nearly a year now, and we should have been much better prepared than we were.

"I am quite sure that the other parties were doing plenty to prepare for this. The view inside the camp is that the party is much more to blame for the loss than the candidate.

The criticism will focus further scrutiny on Salmond's leadership as he prepares to lead the party into the 2007 Holyrood elections. He has raised the bar by vowing to win 20 first-past-the-post seats. At present, the party has eight.

Some critics say that with the SNP leader still based at Westminster, there has been too little attention focused on making gains at the Scottish Parliament.

They contrast the efforts in Cathcart with the more organised campaign the party ran in last week's Livingston Westminster by-election.

The SNP also failed to win there, but succeeded in cutting Labour's majority by 10%.

SNP MSPs now want a thorough postmortem of the Cathcart result to ensure that the same mistakes are not made in 2007. A similar process is likely to take place within the Scottish Socialist party (SSP), which also recorded a disappointing night last Thursday. Its share of the vote slumped from 2,819 votes in 2003 to just 819.

The party's national convener Colin Fox claimed he still had the full confidence of his party after the result, but others are warning that the SSP is suffering from the gap left by Tommy Sheridan's demotion.

Sheridan's former adviser Hugh Kerr said the SSP needed to get Sheridan more involved in the party. "We have to use Tommy more and make sure that he is still a central part of the party. A lot of people think he has resigned as convener and as an MSP. Colin is doing as good a job as he can but it has been difficult to follow Tommy. Anybody following on from that would find it difficult," he said.

Labour's new MSP Charlie Gordon will take up his post this week amid speculation that he will be offered a quick passage into McConnell's ministerial circle.

However, fellow Labour MSPs warned that Gordon should serve his time first before being promoted ahead of fellow colleagues. One said: "My advice to Jack would be that there are plenty of people who have been very loyal to him and who are more deserving of a post first."

A spokesman for the SNP defended the party's efforts, pointing out that it was alone in managing to make gains in both Livingston and Cathcart.

"Our major point of difficulty was the fact that there were two by-elections on the same day on opposite sides of the country.

"That was not in our control but in the hands of Presiding Officer George Reid," said the spokesman.