LINDSAY Roy has officially taken his seat in the House of Commons as the new Labour MP for Glenrothes just a week after his surprise by-election win.
And the result – an only-slightly reduced majority and an increased share of the vote – has given his party a morale boost at Westminster and a new lease of life at Holyrood.
After the devastating defeat in last year's Scottish Parliament election
s and 18 months of despondency, Labour has shown it can once again beat the SNP.
Nationalists are still trying to come to terms with their first major setback in power, telling themselves the honeymoon was never going to last forever, yet wondering how everything went wrong.
A Westminster career looked an unlikely prospect for Mr Roy, the former head of Gordon Brown's old school, Kirkcaldy High, when he was chosen as Labour's candidate for Glenrothes back in September.
After the SNP's storming success in Glasgow East, the assumption on all sides was Labour was set to lose another traditionally safe seat, heaping further humiliation on a beleaguered PM.
Labour chose November 6 as the date of the by-election hoping the aftermath of the US presidential elections two days earlier would drown out SNP crowing about another triumph.
Instead, Labour won and Barack Obama's historic election on the other side of the Atlantic made last Friday a bad day to bury good news.
Alex Salmond cleverly took the sting out of his opponents' attacks by immediately accepting the blame for the defeat.
He said he should have realised earlier the strength of feeling about home care charges, which had been increased by the SNP-Liberal Democrat coalition running Fife Council.
Labour says local income tax was also a significant issue in the by-election, while SNP activists add Labour's claims of education cuts. And in focussing on home care charges, Mr Salmond seems to forget he had put soaring fuel prices at the heart of the campaign, repeatedly declaring that gas and electricity bills thudding on to people's doormats were "the most important leaflets in the election".
If they were, it seems they did not prompt voters to back the SNP.
Of course, it's not for politicians to dictate the issues that people consider in deciding how to vote.
And it is likely that just as the Glasgow East result reflected what was then a widespread disillusionment with Gordon Brown and the UK Government, so Glenrothes showed that amid the global financial crisis, the Prime Minister is seen as a safe pair of hands.
The SNP may also finally be discovering the downside of being in power. The party's failure to win the city council by-election in the Forth ward on the same night was also a disappointment. But with the Nationalists in coalition in both Edinburgh and Fife councils, they have to take responsibility for decisions made.
A senior SNP source admits: "When you are in government and in control of local authorities, you cannot blame the opposition."
But despite the result – and for a government which has been under such sustained attack to maintain a majority of nearly 7000 is remarkable – there is a noticeable absence of triumphalism from Labour. It could be that too much celebration is not appropriate in such bad economic times, but it could also reflect a sober realisation the party still has a lot of work to do.
A Labour insider says: "There is not the elation you might expect. Everyone is being quite measured. It's as if we've had life breathed back into us. The feeling is 'We're back in the game, we need to get stuck into it'. There's an optimism, but it's a very focused optimism.
"Glenrothes has given Labour a breathing space, an opportunity to nail the strategy for the next six, 12 or 18 months."
This insider argues the party is already showing a more constructive approach to opposition, as seen in yesterday's joint call for action with the Greens, Lib Dems and independent Margo MacDonald over repossessions.
"Iain Gray has adopted a more consensual style, doing the groundwork and getting other parties on board. The way we handled the repossession issue was very different from the way we would have done it before."
Labour must not allow itself to think Glenrothes means Scotland has returned to pre-2007 politics where the party can take voters for granted. The chief lesson of last year's Holyrood results was that such arrogance will not be tolerated.
The apparently close fight for Glenrothes between Labour and the SNP meant the Tories and Lib Dems were always going to be squeezed, but they could not have expected to be reduced to the tiny levels of support they received.
For them, this is a by-election to forget as quickly as possible.
And the SNP will probably want to forget it too. After Glasgow East, projections had the party winning 32 Westminster seats at the next general election – well over Mr Salmond's target of 20. But if the five per cent Glenrothes swing were replicated across the country, the Nationalists could expect to elect just two extra MPs.
The full article contains 862 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
