AMIDST the bitter disappointment for the SNP of failing to live up to their tag as bookies' favourites in Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse, there is a genuine silver lining: the result is consistent with the current Scotland-wide opinion polls being accurate.
The swing implied by the Norstat poll a few days ago suggested that the SNP ought to defeat Labour in the by-election by a tiny margin of less than one percentage point, whereas in fact Labour came out on top by just over two points.
That's a trivial difference, and thus the result lends support to the main message of the polls, which is that the SNP enjoy a substantial nationwide lead on the Holyrood constituency ballot.
Hamilton should not be mistaken for a bellwether constituency.
It's significantly tilted towards Labour, in the sense that if support for the SNP and Labour was roughly tied across Scotland, Labour would likely be winning Hamilton by a double-digit margin. It's absolutely possible for the SNP to remain the largest single party in the Scottish Parliament if they lose in Hamilton again next May, and even if they lose by a bigger margin than they did in the by-election.
The potential problem, however, is that by-election results do not just passively provide insights into the present state of play. They can also in themselves be drivers of public opinion. In particular, surprise by-election outcomes often generate snowball effects in favour of the winning party.
The SNP are still haunted by the memory of how their unexpectedly heavy drubbing in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election in 2023 provided Labour with a springboard that helped propel Keir Starmer to a majority of Scottish seats in the 2024 general election.
Fortunately, there's a good reason for doubting that a similar effect will occur after Hamilton.
The UK Labour government is one of the most hapless administrations in living memory, and it seems entirely plausible that within a few days the afterglow of the by-election result will be overshadowed by yet another misstep from Starmer or Rachel Reeves.
If the SNP can just weather the short-term storm of a few painful headlines, it's conceivable that within a few months they'll look back at this by-election as having no real significance beyond the obvious fact that it reduced their contingent of MSPs by one.
That said, it's also important to consider the question of the dog that didn't bark.
The only reason the Labour win comes as a surprise is that expectations of a massive Reform UK breakthrough, and a two-horse race between the SNP and Reform, had been allowed to run away with themselves.
If the result had played out in line with those expectations, there was a theory that John Swinney would have been in a no-lose situation, because he could have used any Reform win to rally the anti-Farage vote behind the SNP, who would have looked like the only remaining alternative to a Reform-led government in Edinburgh.
Instead, Anas Sarwar has been reconfirmed as the leading challenger to Swinney, albeit only just - and it's obviously a lot harder to paint Sarwar as a bogey-man.
But in truth it's perhaps just as well for the SNP that Reform weren't able to use Hamilton to establish themselves as the main opposition party in Scotland.
If they had done, there's a danger that the rump Tory vote might have moved across to Farage en masse, and pushed Reform to the type of vote share where they could have seriously threatened the SNP on the constituency ballot next year.
There's something to be said for staying in the more familiar territory of an SNP v Labour battle, not least because Starmer's unpopularity ought to ensure there is a hard ceiling on Labour support next May.
Another consolation for the SNP is that they can point to their narrow defeat as a timely wake-up call for the independence movement.
The Scottish Green candidate in Hamilton took 695 votes, amounting to a 2.6% vote share. If there had been no Green candidate, and if the SNP had taken at least 87% of Green votes, Labour would have been defeated.
In practice that's not what would have happened in the real world, so the Green intervention did not cost the SNP victory. But it's now clear that there are some central belt constituencies that the SNP will not win next year unless they can squeeze votes from smaller pro-independence parties, and unless they can persuade disillusioned SNP voters not to stay at home.
A few constituencies here or there could make all the difference between retaining the pro-independence majority at Holyrood, and losing it.
