Jackanory Jim's investiture as the High Priest of Patriotism was, according to his most devoted admirers (many of them southern Tories), supposed to produce some kind of "honeymoon effect" for Scottish Labour in the opinion polls. To be fair, the jury is still out on whether that will prove to be the case, because we only have very limited evidence to go on so far. But, for what it's worth, that early evidence provides no encouragement at all for followers of the Church of the Crate.
The first GB-wide poll to have been entirely conducted in the Murphy Era has just been published by YouGov, and the Scottish subsample shows the SNP ahead of Labour by 43% to 26%. If anything, that's a tad higher than the type of lead that has been typical over the last three months.
We also have two subsamples from polls that were partly conducted after the Coming of the Crate-Meister. Populus have the SNP ahead by 36% to 28%, which as you'll remember from the song-and-dance Mike Smithson made about the Populus aggregate for the month of November, is significantly higher than the average SNP lead shown by that firm of late. ComRes also have the SNP on 36% - but they have Labour on an abysmally low 21%.
Things may yet get better for the Irn-Bru Icon - but then they sure as hell can't get much worse.
On a Britain-wide basis, the YouGov poll puts the SNP and Plaid Cymru just 1% behind the Liberal Democrats for the fourth time in the last couple of weeks. The Greens have opened up a 2% lead over the Lib Dems for the first time in a YouGov poll, and are now just 6% behind UKIP.
Britain-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 14th-15th December) :
Labour 34% (+2)
Conservatives 32% (n/c)
UKIP 14% (-2)
Greens 8% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)
SNP/Plaid Cymru 5% (+1)
BNP 1% (+1)
Nicola Sturgeon, Leanne Wood and Natalie Bennett certainly couldn't have chosen a better moment to join forces to demand inclusion in the TV leaders' debates.
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