When you exist in a multi-party society, amid the blessings of a quirky, hybrid electoral system, always have that pinch of emergency salt ready. Beware those who "project" the "likely" numbers of parliamentary seats winnable when the people speak. Beware anyone who makes assumptions on the assumption that the people - the b***ards - will actually speak.

First rule of politics: get the vote out. First rule of political journalism: always doubt what you think you know. Both rules are available, no charge, to campaign managers.

Once upon a time, I worked with a news editor who demanded that I stick out my neck. It was my neck, not his. A General Election was going on. The late Nicholas Fairbairn had delivered himself of some spectacularly racist remarks. He had then threatened to sue me - and "that chap from The Herald" (Morning, Murray) - for making a record of spectacular racism while insinuating that the distinguished candidate was campaigning-while-pissed.

A no-brainer. Stick my neck out? Fairbairn was dead and gone. Michael Forsyth was bobbing face down, finally, in the waters of general contempt. I had just spent a fortnight on the hilarious John Major battle bus and arrived at the well-informed conviction that an era was ending. I was convinced, moreover, that Scottish Conservatism had looked doom in the face and noticed a resemblance.

Didn't happen. The dishonourable Nicky was returned. Forsyth did better, for a while, than survive. A sub-clause to the first rule of political journalism: no-one ever sues the pollsters, more's the pity.

I can chew numbers with the best. In 2007, samples of Scots who pretend they are certain to vote also pretend that they mostly favour the Scottish National Party, but not, as it happens, independence. Odd. These odd findings are consistent.

Labour's fears lie elsewhere. In the context of a Scottish campaign they hint, in fact, at blasphemy. The numbers says that the Labour vote is holding up well given the atrocities committed by a Labour prime minister. The truly significant Scottish fact is that the party isn't getting more of a hiding.

The missing voters - call them "emotional Labour" - will stay at home. Such is the real electoral disaster for which Jack McConnell will take a fall, on May 4, just before lunch. The SNP hasn't won, but Labour has lost. The other profound truth is that nationalism has garnered too few converts. If Salmond cannot clobber Unionism after Iraq, Trident and the best economics available, why waste everyone's time with a referendum?

One answer: no Tories. Or rather, no Scottish Conservatism (and Unionism) worth the name. I treat polls with the same suspicion as those who conduct the things. Those earnest souls tend to be eager, honest, and self-deprecating. The truth, they say, is never in the headline. They hate that newspapers prefer academic psephology, no questions asked, to the numbers. They remind you that political science is not, in fact, a science. The Scottish campaign is messier than headlines allow. Votes are flying all over the shop. Clearly, the Nationalists have prospered. Yet imagine the copy if Team Salmond had arrived at day three, week one, in this of all campaigns, without a commanding lead in the polls. Given the Iraq occupation it should be crushing, not "leading", Labour. How much can you buy with Brian Souter's Monopoly money?

Then ask yourself why the SNP vote appears to be leaching towards the serial adulterers called Liberal and Democrat, or why Greens are still in the fight, or why the SSP and Solidarity yet survive. Then remind yourself never to trust the polls.

My former colleague Michael Fry, distinguished historian and recent convert to the bright side, used to like to take arguments for a promenade. Before the Tories frustrated his ambitions - such is the fate of smart in the stupid party - Fry used to observe that European conservatives tend invariably towards nationalism. He used to wonder, too loudly for his own good, whether Scots Tories were missing the point.

In those days, I launched a bobbing cliché of my own. "It isn't actually compulsory to have a Tory party," I would write, through the dark years. I suggested that Scottish Conservatives were an accident of history and land-ownership. I forgot about stupidity. I hadn't bargained for Annabel Goldie.

She knows that we know. In the era of the David Cameron quiff, the deputising Murdo Fraser is the next hairstyle in town. Equally, in the intellectually problematic world of modern Conservatism, the sten-torian Fraser will have to sort out what, if anything, the Scottish Tories are for. Ms Goldie says they are not for coalition because coalitions - you know that I paraphrase - are the last resort of very bad lots. First, is she kidding? Our hybrid system demands pacts and deals if government is not to become unstable, and if - a detail worth noting when electoral rumps hope to wag dogs - old political tails need to avoid docking. Everyone makes an arrangement.

Secondly, Ms Goldie has expended a lot of Holyrood time explaining that devolution isn't "working". Scotland's Tories have gritted their teeth, swallowed hard and accepted that their chums in the cutty sark press were wrong: the people do not want to be rid of a parliament. That was a myth. Bury the headlines and stop all the clocks: home rule and democracy are the same. So what follows?

If anything, the people wish to see democracy expand to occupy the available political space. "More powers," in the paraphrase. How is that to be reconciled with a Unionist party declining all responsibility for government just at the moment when Unionism, albeit of a Labour sort, most needs help? Thirdly, how does this abstentionism make devolution, in the Tory styling, work "better"?

Those of us who observe Holyrood, now and then, know what Goldie is about. Here's a minor party, failing steadily, hoping to tease and cajole Labour - dread word - into a marriage of inconvenience and duvet-theft. She hopes that her party will be able to pick and choose, demand legislation, cosset Labour while denouncing Labour and escape all blame.

That sounds like a plan. That sounds, equally, like the sort of plan capable of allowing a minor (very minor) Scottish party to throw Scotland into upheaval for four years, with power sans responsibility, while making home rule work "better".

Only a pair of wholeheartedly Unionist parties survive in this country. They are being picked off, one by one.

The historical interest lies, meanwhile, in the fact that each of these stalwarts has fallen in the self-same, self-determination ditch. The immediate relevance has to do with dim, Poujadist Scottish Tories, and their ineffable impertinence.

Ms Goldie will suck-and-see at legislation, given the chance, thanks to 13% of bothered-to-vote? I don't think so. Ms Goldie will adopt political clients as whim, Cameron, expediency and circumstances demand?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but how does that make devolution "work better"? How does that make devolution work at all?

Seriously: is this the best the Union has got? In my lifetime, the eradication of Scottish Conservatism was the first and greatest straw in the wind. It turns out that Labour now needs ancient enemies merely to shore up the ruins. Yet the old enemies don't, can't, won't see the obvious. Care? I come from another country.