FOR almost five years from December 1994 I was the first full-time chief executive of the SNP and acted as its spin doctor, in tandem with that legend in political communications Kevin Pringle.

Spin Doctoring 101 has as its first lesson the absolute necessity to stop a bad story in its tracks as quickly as possible. The second is never let a story damage the core message of the party or government. Thirdly, but most importantly, always tell the truth.

Clearly Cummings didn’t take the course.

The ridiculous Barnard Castle part of his account at the presumptuous Rose Garden event on Monday had me laughing out loud. It sounded like bad fiction.

Johnson’s autocratic but incompetent attempts to shut the story down are eroding his and his party’s political position and driving down support. Refusing to take action means that anger and incredulity just goes on building.

It is now certain that there is a heavy political price being paid. How heavy that is and what flows from it depends on many factors including the focus (or otherwise) of the media, the courage (or otherwise) of Tory MPs and members, and the persistence (or otherwise) of ordinary citizens who are rightly very annoyed indeed.

In addition to spin doctoring, another part of my work as chief executive was to run the party’s campaigns. Twenty-five years ago this week Roseanna Cunningham, now Scotland’s longest continuously serving parliamentarian, won the Perth and Kinross by-election, a contest which started with its own media storm, following a botched selection process at HQ. However in this case public sympathy was with the candidate and by the time she was on the streets she had instant, positive recognition.

The campaign also survived a ham-fisted attempt to do away with discretionary disabled transport by the then SNP Tayside administration, a media pack that made daily morning press conferences into battlefields so that they could – and this is an actual quote from one of them – “make her cry” (they didn’t). It also featured virtual hand-to-hand combat for the key pitch of Perth High Street on a Saturday morning and a few mysteries such as the real background to the famous “amalgamated Highland thing-a-ma-jigs” answer from the Tory candidates’ MP minder Raymond Robertson when asked on camera to name the Scottish regiments.

It has to be admitted that the Perth and Kinross by-election was at times reduced to a circus and as such it even had its own clowns. The inadvertent one was the Tory candidate, London banker John Godfrey, who on one doorstep, having said to the householder that the choice was “me or a leap in the dark with the SNP’ had to suffer the immediate response “I think I’ll take the leap in the dark”. The deliberate one was Screaming Lord Sutch who was putting in his last Scottish appearance in 41 UK elections.

Yet all that being said, prior to devolution Scottish Westminster by-elections were the only serious crucible for political debate in a country whose Parliament was distant from the electorate in every sense. They were in addition the only events in which the SNP could demand equal treatment to the UK parties and get it because electoral law demanded it too.

Perth and Kinross was a highly significant by-election for the nationalist cause.

It was the first in which the SNP was the frontrunner throughout and it was the first electoral testing of the party’s decision to professionalise following the disappointment of the 1992 General Election (in which we added 50% to our vote but took not a single extra seat) and the near-miss at the Monklands by-election the year before.

Failure was not an option for the SNP or for the then leader Alex Salmond and myself. There was no doubt that our jobs were on the line because we were not without critics resistant to the type of changes we were making.

Fortunately in the end a united SNP campaign faced down the political and media onslaught. It did so by choosing and supporting the right candidate with the right material and delivering the right on-the-ground campaign with the right message.

The political lessons, then and now are clear. Electoral success comes through honesty and credibility. It takes nothing and nobody for granted. It respects voters rather than treating them with contempt.

Come to think of it, that was the Tories’ problem back in 1995 just as it has been this past week.

In fact, even more so.