PERHAPS this is what two years of incessant grooming by the BBC’s London headquarters and the massed ranks of the right-wing print media do to you. Even when the opinion polls and the evidence of your own eyes and ears tell you that there is now the merest possibility of a Jeremy Corbyn victory tomorrow you can’t quite bring yourself to hope. Labour leaders just don’t make comebacks of this measure, do they? Once the press barons and their old Etonian fags at Broadcasting House and at Whitehall had passed judgment on Foot, Callaghan, Kinnock and dear old deluded Gordon the fate of each was sealed.

Corbyn, of course, has had it far worse than any of his predecessors. They could look their enemies in the eye and see from which direction the next thrust would come. Corbyn, alone amongst all of Labour’s post-war leaders has had to face down foes from within his own party much more insidious than his traditional external enemies.

Yet today, though a Labour election victory remains unlikely, it is within the realms of possibility. Six weeks ago even Katie Hopkins would have fancied her chances against him. It seemed then that Corbyn’s reputation could not have sunk any lower. He had reached that place from which no politician has ever returned: the one where he has been judged and found guilty merely of being Jeremy Corbyn.

In six weeks though, it seems that scales have fallen from the eyes of many and they have perceived a different reality. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, who had previously never had to work particularly hard for anything she has gained in her life (and certainly not in her political career) has come to understand that even one as privileged as she would have to turn and fight; would have to reveal something of her true self. And when, at last, it happened it wasn’t a pretty sight.

This is a UK leader seemingly devoid of any guiding political principles and one whose lack of anything resembling a vision made her chinless predecessor seem like Nelson Mandela in comparison.

May is the first UK political leader of the modern era who believed that she could win an election on an assumption, for her mind too had been groomed by the London media. Her opponent was so hopeless and her popularity so evident that she wouldn’t actually have to, you know, do any campaigning. Well she kens noo. No matter what tomorrow brings Theresa May is damaged beyond repair; her ability to deliver anything approaching a decent Brexit now destroyed.

Corbyn’s leadership of his party, no matter the outcome, is assured. The electorate — even those who won’t vote for him — now know that he isn’t a card-carrying Communist infiltrator who hates Britain. In this campaign he has emerged as a credible political leader with a reasonable and economically sustainable programme of social democracy who is as patriotic as the queen. The worst that his opponents could throw at him was his attempts to converse with the IRA leadership in the 1980s. That soon evaporated though, when it emerged that he was one of a long line of senior British politicians who had also taken tea with the Provos.

If the previously unthinkable (and now merely unlikely) happens and Corbyn becomes Prime Minister he will immediately look around him for his allies and begin the task of rooting out his enemies. His ascension to Number 10 will have been achieved in no small part thanks to the efforts of the SNP in standing in the gap where Labour in Scotland used to be before it fell among thieves and was abducted.

Corbyn already knows that he has more in common with the SNP than with the gang of self-serving opportunists that have taken Labour to the edge of oblivion in Scotland. He knows too that an administration headed by him will receive more loyal support from the SNP’s 40-odd MPs than he might lately have come to expect from Kezia Dugdale and Ian Murray, the man whose smile, to paraphrase Daniel O’Connell, resembles the brass nameplate on a coffin lid.

No Scottish Secretary in a Labour administration was ever as hopeless as Murray, a politician who came and went with no discernible trace of his ever having been here in the first place. Not only did he participate in a botched leadership coup; he hid behind the sofa and only emerged when it was safe to do so. Nothing illustrated the wretched state of Scottish Labour more than this, the ignoble conduct of its only Westminster member.

On Monday evening we were treated to a Party Election Broadcast by Scottish Labour. What ensued in those two minutes was indicative of how bankrupt and dishonest this wretched organisation has come to be. In an election which represents the nation’s only chance to ditch a regressive, hard-right and insular government the broadcast mentioned the Tories only once and the NHS three times. This is a UK election yet Scottish Labour’s broadcast mentioned the independence referendum no fewer than nine times.

If Corbyn arrives at power after tomorrow (and even if he doesn’t) he must move decisively and ruthlessly to dismantle the entire leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland.

And then, for the purposes of ensuring that it never happens again, he must hold an inquiry into the reasons why it ever arrived at such a state. He must also loosen the grip of the assorted Lords and Barons whose baleful influence still holds sway over the party in Scotland. And then he must quickly agree a timetable with the SNP for an independence referendum. For it will not have escaped him that only when Scotland’s constitutional future is settled one way or another can his party attempt to mount a comeback north of the Border.

Corbyn is an internationalist and this is cited as a primary reason for opposing any moves that could be said to cast barriers between nations. Equally though, as an internationalist he must also recognise the aspirations of nations to determine their own future. And then to build a mutually beneficial alliance with an old friend whose vision of equality and fairness most closely resembles his own.

An independent Scotland offers that, while the collection of insurgents which lurks in his Scottish branch does not.