POOR Jim Murphy, it’s been a rough week. Even BBC Scotland couldn’t avoid a mention of his troubles – just the one mention, very, very briefly sandwiched between stories about cute kittens and lots and lots of fitba. So if you blinked you’d have missed it – but still.

When even BBC Scotland has to acknowledge that Jim isn’t driving Labour’s battlebus along a highway to an ever more perfect Union, then you know something has gone very seriously wrong. And it has. Jim’s campaign is now roadkill; the battlebus is bust. Not that I’m accusing the BBC Scotland news and current affairs management team of being biased, not at all. But then tabloid newspapers that print vows in faux parchment script don’t think they’re biased either. Me, I’m totally biased. But at least I admit it.

Anyway, after being publicly slapped on the face with an austerity fish by Ed Balls, chucked under that battlebus by Chuka Umunna and seeing Labour’s popularity plummet in a Scottish opinion poll to near Cleggesque levels, James Francis Murphy BA Politics (not really) is now envious that Ed Miliband only has to contend with a video of him picking his nose. Jim would give anything for that problem, whereas his problems have been caused by the fact that he’s spent the past five months digging all his policies out of another orifice entirely. Now things have got so bad Jim has been forced to attack the Tories instead of the SNP.

Clearly, Jim taking over as branch manager hasn’t worked out, according to the exultant predictions in the UK press. Jim was the big hitter who was going to show those provincial politicians how the big boys did things. He’d put the nationalist genie back in the Buckie bottle and deep fry their Mars bars. Jim would save Scotland for the Union and lazy Caledonian stereotypes.

The metrocommentariat said that the only reason the uppity separatists were guffawing so loudly was because they were terrified by Jim and his big hitty thing. Jim would put those nationalists in their place. They knew this because a press release from Jim’s publicity people had told them so, so it had to be true. Jim wouldn’t lie.

But the big boy has had his backside kicked by the wee lassie with the tin hat. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Shoutiness hasn’t worked, patronising condescension hasn’t worked, scare stories haven’t worked, smears haven’t worked, promises of jam haven’t worked, even Scottish Labour’s favourite fall-back tactic of flat out lying hasn’t worked.

They always worked in the past because the party could rely on a tsunami of favourable press coverage from the Scottish media, and especially from BBC Scotland. But we had a referendum last year, and Scotland learned how to surf.

All that Jim has left is to try to rerun the referendum campaign and hope for some eggs so he can pose as a protector of Unionist poultry. But Jim’s chickens have come home to roost, and the only thing flying thick and fast is the guano.

Most of which is landing on Jim.

It was revealed this week that Jim has a police presence at Labour events to defend the defender of the Union against any ovoid assaults. There isn’t any police presence at LibDem events – some unkind souls have suggested that this is because the LibDems haven’t paid the polis for policing the LibDem conference and the polis are quite happy for Wullie Rennie and the number 19 bus to Kelty to remain unprotected.

It is in fact because attacking the LibDems is like attacking the dodo. There’s no point.

Just look at Alistair Carmichael, who is pointlessness on a smeary plate.

After being telt by the Eds and chucked by Chuka, Jim felt the need to recoup a sliver of his authority. Following Labour’s real leadership’s announcement that the leader of the party in Scotland didn’t get to determine the UK budget, Jim tweeted that he was in charge of how the money was spent in Scotland. Not the Scottish Government, apparently.

All that devolution, and the most powerful person in the land is a Labour backbencher. Was that a part of the rapidly unravelling Vow as well?

Jim didn’t clarify, he’d quickly moved on to yelling at the Tories and hoping Scottish voters have forgotten how he was cosying up to the Tories just a few short months ago, and indeed spent most of the recent rammython on the BBC Politics Show high-fiving Ruth Davidson and ganging up with her against Nicola.

Earlier this week the Tory manifesto included a provision to strip Scottish MPs of the right to vote on income tax bands in the Commons. It’s a betrayal of the Smith Commission, yelled Jim, glad of a distraction technique. Jim knows a lot about betraying the Smith Commission as he and his party spent most of the negotiations gutting any proposals for the meaningful devolution of extra powers and doing their utmost to reduce it to the absolute minimum that they could get away with.

Power over the minimum wage? You can’t have that. Power over abortion? That’s not going to happen. Control of broadcasting? Not even the testcard.

For Labour, the Smith Commission was an exercise in extracting party political advantage and not about responding to what Scotland wants, and now they’re complaining the Tories are doing exactly the same thing.

Jim has run out of tactics and the battlebus has run out of road. His midge strategy of producing a cloud of wee nasty bites which would draw SNP blood has failed miserably. No one likes midges and in any case 45 per cent of the Scottish population are genetically immune to midge bites. Considerably more are immune to the blandishments of Jim, but that’s what happens after you’ve spent the past 20 years of your political career out-Blairing Tony Blair, and then you claim to be a socialist. The lesson for Labour in this campaign is that even midges are more popular than hypocrites. On May 7, we’ll be getting out the flyspray.