It is unlikely to command much airtime on Newsnight or worry leader writers on the Daily Telegraph, but Labour is already in the throes of a divisive leadership contest - to find a successor to Wendy Alexander as Scottish party leader.
North of the Tweed, at least, that contest may yet determine the outcome of the next general election and with it Alex Salmond's boast of making Westminster "dance to a Scottish jig".
And the search for the Scottish party's third leader in 18 months has led to precisely the kind of infighting you'd imagine Labour would want to avoid after their drubbing at Glasgow East.
To the immense irritation of some backbenchers at Westminster, one of the three contestants - the former health minister Andy Kerr - wants the next leader to have real control of the party in Scotland, including authority over Labour's 38 Scottish MPs.
Already alarmed by this empire building, MPs were enraged after one of Kerr's backers, the former Holyrood finance minister Tom McCabe, accused some comrades in the Commons of being "arrogant" and "in denial" about the scale of their difficulties.
In return, MPs accuse Kerr of wanting to create the "SNP mark two".
Labour's parliamentary group at Holyrood exists in a peculiar bubble within the UK party. While it energetically devolved significant legislative powers to the new Scottish parliament in 1998, Labour failed to do so internally. Its Scottish leader is just group leader at Holyrood; true power rests with the UK leader - Brown.
Kerr believes this inhibits the Scottish party, prevents it from pursuing policies independent of London and allows it to be nimbly out-manoeuvred by the indefatigable Salmond (a case forcibly made before by Alexander).
Since they know fine well that no possible Labour leader in Scotland can match Salmond's rhetorical skill or personal popularity, greater freedom on policy may be the only new tool it has. Waiting for Salmond's economic policies to unravel - as Kerr claims they surely will - may not be enough if Labour's unpopularity continues.
Until the humiliation of losing Glasgow East, its third safest seat in Scotland, stopping Salmond from winning the next Holyrood election in 2011 by an even greater margin than last May's single seat had been Labour's chief objective in Scotland.
But the task is now more urgent: Labour faces the very real prospect of losing other significant Scottish seats at the next general election - which comes first.
The SNP's analysis of recent UK and Scottish opinion polls suggests that - for the first time in its history - it is ahead of Labour in the Westminster vote, by at least 6%.
The nationalists are eyeing up prize seats such as Des Browne's Kilmarnock and Loudoun seat and, buoyed by the 22% swing in Glasgow East, gleefully claim that even Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Douglas Alexander are vulnerable.
So too, to a more modest extent, are the Scottish Liberal Democrats. They too are choosing a new leader (recess? What recess?) and the stand-out favourite, Tavish Scott, claims they can take Edinburgh South, currently held by former minister Nigel Griffiths by a slender 405 votes over the Lib Dems.
Bouyed by opinion polls suggesting they are just six points behind Labour in Scotland, even the Tories are eyeing up ministerial seats, including Alistair Darling's in Edinburgh South West and Jim Murphy's in East Renfrewshire. The Scottish party is already planning for the election, working to a "100-week grid" for its leader, Annabel Goldie.
Kerr regrets McCabe's choice of words, but is holding his ground. He insists that Labour HQ in London - and by clear implication Gordon Brown - has to devolve authority to the Scottish party if it is serious about stopping Salmond's nationalist juggernaut in its tracks.
Speaking after a lunchtime meeting with a cadre of 15 activists in rain-drenched Dundee yesterday, Kerr said: "I'm probably the most ardent unionist in the Scottish parliament ... However, my political experience for the last 10 years or more is that Scots do want a different, distinctive Scottish voice to shout for them."
McCabe too is unabashed. He claims a surge in support for Kerr after his critique: "The tenor of the response is: 'Thank God someone has said it.'"
Funnily enough, the leadership hopeful seen as Brown's favoured candidate, the new Labour-ish former enterprise minister Iain Gray, disagrees with Kerr. His supporters insist that Kerr's stance has seen support from MPs swing sharply in Gray's direction.
Compared to Kerr and the third contender, the old left candidate and long-serving deputy leader at Holyrood, Cathy Jamieson, Gray is the least experienced and least known. But the odds are narrowing on Gray winning the contest on September 13.
The kicker is that in his four-year absence from Holyrood between 2003 and 2007, Gray was a special adviser at Westminster to Darling, Brown's closest ally in cabinet.
He won 13 leadership nominations from fellow MSPs; Jamieson 12 and Kerr 10. Since he also claims backing from both Labour's Scottish MEPs, winning the Mps' contest (under Labour's convoluted electoral system, they have a third of the vote) could be decisive.
Gray's people could point out that even when the Tories ruled Scotland in the 1990s with openly liberal policies at complete odds with John Major's government in London, that failed to stop the anti-Tory landslide. They still have only one MP in a kilt.
This is the first in a series of regular blog posts from Severin Carrell
