At short notice, Alex Salmond calls a press conference - a rarity in this
campaign and packed into the headquarters meeting room. It’s too late in the
campaign to challenge the manifesto details. All the questions assume the
SNP leader could be First Minister later this month, with Westminster lobby
correspondents joshing, and being patronised in return. The tone is all
about reassuring voters. The Nationalist campaign exudes a sense of being in
top gear and cruising comfortably.

By contrast, Labour is across Edinburgh in the Corn Exchange, pumping the
accelerator hard to find some extra throttle by Thursday. This is an event
where Jack McConnell is support act for Tony Blair, on his last Scottish
campaign speech as Prime Minister. It is ten years since the election day
that put him in power and 300 years since Scotland began to be ruled from
London. The air should be heavy with history, but instead it is heavy with
Labour uncertainty and unease.

Love him or loathe him – and this party audience loves him – a Blair speech
is (almost) always a class act. It was columnist Matthew Parris observed he
couldn’t see a Blair speech without seeing him as an actor, and you can
still sense the greasepaint and footlights of the Fettes College stage on
which he started out, only a couple of miles from here.

On the Sun’s front page, Hagrid, aka Robbie Coltrane, is endorsing Labour.
This endorsement stuff is getting silly – but then again, where are the
Krankies when their country needs them? Trainspotting actor Robert Carlyle
at least sprang a pleasant surprise on the SNP this morning, telling Radio
Four he is breaking with generations of his family’s Labour tradition and
going Nationalist. Begbie Goes Radge for Eck.

I’m up early, hazily giving Radio Scotland the benefit of my views on last
night’s TV debate between the four leaders. This is something like theatre
reviewing, but without much of a plotline to follow.

We’re told the public don’t like Punch and Judy politics, and that may be
true, but this bunch are much too polite to each other. Perhaps these TV
debates should let the leaders have a go at each other, instead of
responding to punters. They know best where the weak spots are in each
other’s policies.

Judging by the questions, the burning issue is the Iraq war. Odd that people
had an opportunity at the 2005 election to give Tony Blair a kick in protest
at the debacle, but they gave him a renewed mandate instead. Voters knew
then that it was going hideously wrong, we had been through the Kelly death
and various damning reports into the intelligence, plus Rose Gentle was
among those campaigning on the issue. Yet it is only now that Labour seems
to be suffering the consequences, when Blair is going anyway.

Four Sunday newspapers have endorsed the SNP, or at least an SNP-led
coalition. All of them argue it’s time for change, reflecting a sense of
disappointment at a Labour-led administration, but none of them fired up
with enthusiasm for the SNP alternative. Oddly, that sense of disappointment
does not seem to extend to Liberal Democrats, in that the newspaper
endorsements stress that the SNP should be in coalition. Implicitly, that
means the Lib Dems staying in power.

According to an SNP campaign insider: “It’s like buses. You wait 73 years
for a newspaper to support the Scottish National Party, and then four of
them come along on one day”. That is to forget The Sun supported the SNP in
1992, and was later brought into line by proprietor Rupert Murdoch to
support New Labour by 1997. At this election, with the Sun now the biggest
selling daily paper in Scotland, Gordon Brown has put pressure on its bosses
in London to ensure it is a cheerleader. The Daily Record, which used to be
the biggest seller and the main Labour cheerleader, is now pushing exactly
the same line as the Sun, which makes you wonder how they are to
differentiate in a crowded marketplace.

Newspapers have long been a big frustration for the SNP, particularly at the
1999 election, when the Record led a serious and effective monstering. Why
is it, Nats have long asked, that one of the two main parties in Scotland
has no media cheerleader? They have a point. But they ask the question as if
editors draw lots to share out political allegiances. The answer to their
frustration may not be that the SNP gains a tabloid cheerleader. More likely
is that Labour loses one, or two, or more. Political cheerleading makes for
more interesting newspaper copy, but I’ve never seen the point in alienating
large chunks of your readership, and potential readership, by monstering the
party many of them are supporting.

At home in East Lothian, I scan the blue skies for the SNP’s 80 foot “It’s Time...” banner, being flown across central Scotland on the final Saturday of Holyrood campaigning. But no sign. This is not a target seat. Only a
Labour catastrophe would unseat it here, so I have been un-inundated with campaign literature. Lampposts are sprouting evidence of a campaign, though – the only physical sign for a visitor that history could be in the making within the week.