Potential Scottish Labour leaders are dropping like flies. Gordon’s out, Anus is out and even the continuity-Lamont candidate Kezia Dugdale is out. Margaret Curran – who knifed her old best friend – is suspiciously quiet, but the bookies are eyeing  up Jim Murphy.

It’s going to be an interesting narrative for the Catholic right-winger to shape if he’s to get the job that nobody wants. Firstly he’s a teetotal vegetarian. Which is sure to endear him to the Scottish populace. Perhaps he’s making  up for the time he had scurvy.

And then there are his school days. Will left-wing opponents argue that his going to a racially segregated school is worse than being an old Etonian? Murphy is an old boy of Milnerton High School, the segregated private school in Cape Town that Murphy attended when his family chose to emigrate to apartheid South Africa in 1979. Other notable alumni include Dr. Wouter Basson – nicknamed Dr Death – the former head of South Africa’s secret chemical and biological warfare project, Project Coast.

But worse than all this, in the eyes of the Labour Party: Murphy is a Blairite.