From "slippery" to "sharp."

Mr Smith read with interest the apparent praise of the SNP's "sharp" campaign during the May's Scottish Parliament elections from no less than Downing Street's former Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell.

Mr Smith notes that in Mr Campbell's book, "The Blair Years," he includes only two references to Alex Salmond (Pages 365 and 372) the first of which records comments made by late First Minister Donald Dewar in the run up to the 1999 Scottish Parliament in which Mr Dewar said Mr Salmond "was vulnerable to a sense of being slippery." Mr Campbell goes on to say that the objective of the 1999 Labour election campaign was to "put over the cost of separatism."

Well as Mr Campbell knows that tactic worked in 1999, and more so even in 2003, but singularly failed to impress in 2007, perhaps because the SNP had defused the issue by promising a separate and later independence referendum. It's just a pity that no-one in Labour's 2007 election high command seemed to have noticed the change.