A plan that is near-impossible to explain, far less to enact, is a very bad plan.Understandably enough, opponents have taken to describing this as a dog’s breakfast. In reality, the alimentary throughput of Fido’s petit dejeuner bears a closer resemblance to what Blair has deposited on Scotland’s doorstep The pup has now been sold. Next stop: Downing Street.Ian Bell is a columnist with the ‘Scotsman’. The way people write menus evolves as fast as the way cooking evolves, perhaps even faster.

I don’t mean the way people actually use handwriting on menus, although even that changes from time to time. As George Robertson has been discovering this week, even Labour’s famously loyal Scottish supporters have their limits. Given the hurdles, it seems inconceivable now that Scotland will achieve anything meaningful under a Labour government. The consequences of that fact have yet to sink in, but they will begin to do so in the weeks and months leading to the next general election. Blair, many are concluding, has set himself to sabotage serious devolution.He has probably succeeded.

More importantly, it raises some fairly profound questions about Blair’s leadership. If this was an example of astuteness, Labour supporters in Scotland would probably risk being spared further outbreaks of cleverness. If this was a consequence of his vaunted toughness, the people in his slipstream might begin to ask themselves just where toughness is leading them.But there is a bigger worry, and one that is now commonplace in Scotland: that despite all he has said, the Labour leader does not always mean what he says. The chain of events since the first referendum plan was launched 10 weeks ago seems altogether too ridiculous, too uncharacteristically ham-fisted, to be accidental. What does that tell us?At the very least, it says very little for the fabled efficiency of New Labour, never mind its grasp of political realities.

Nevertheless, it was Mohammad Sarwar, the candidate for Govan, who alone cooked up the baffling compromise that Robertson and Blair were only too delighted to accept. Labour are still 19 points clear (48 to the SNP’s 29) but the Nationalists could not have asked for a better time, or excuse, to stage one of their periodic revivals.It is possible, just about, to describe this comedy as a thing of simple errors. Certainly the fact that the fate of the entire devolution campaign, not to mention the credibility of the Scottish Labour Party, was left in the hands of one prospective parliamentary candidate looks like a fairly big mistake in anyone’s terms. Given the Tories’ standing in the polls (15 per cent) this amounts, however, to little more than harmless fun, at least in Scottish terms.Then again, as both Major and the Scottish National Party realise, Labour’s executive has done their work for them A gift horse is running in the stupidity stakes.