Anas Sarwar must have some pretty damning kompromat on the genie he found in that lamp all those years ago. His mandated three wishes are surely up and yet the luck of the luckiest politician in Scotland continues.

The SNP has responded to a disastrous general election with infighting and gloom and navel gazing and - depending on who you talk to - appear to have already given up on winning in 2026.

At least for John Swinney, the prospect of an almighty rammy at this weekend’s conference will take his mind off the tough choices he’ll need to make when Parliament returns and Shona Robison sets out her cuts for the year ahead.

The public finances are in a dire state and, as the Scottish Fiscal Commission pointed out on Tuesday, that’s partly to do with the UK Government and quite a bit to do with the Scottish Government.

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We’ve already been told peak fares will return to ScotRail and now senior civil servants are warning SNP ministers might need to bring in means testing for prescriptions, school meals and tuition fees. 

That’s a tough backdrop for the FM to fight a Holyrood election where he's already up against it. 

Meanwhile, the Scottish Tories seem to be having a furious civil war over who can lead the party into a distant third place. All the while completely ignoring the fact that Reform is slowly stealing their voters.

Last week, in the Armadale and Blackridge by-election in West Lothian, Nigel Farage’s party took 19% of the vote. A poll over the weekend suggested they could get as many as eight MSPs. 

And this is without even trying. 

The signs are good for Labour. 

A poll over the weekend suggested they could end up with just one less seat than the SNP at the Scottish Parliament election.

The Norstat opinion poll for The Sunday Times - the first to be conducted since the general election - put the Lib Dems on eight and the Scottish Tories on 18, the Scottish Greens on eight and Alba on four. 

(Image: PA)

In that scenario, the numbers mean it would be the Sarwar family moving into Bute House. 

Last year, in his address to his party conference, the party boss told delegates that it wasn’t enough for Labour “to tell people that the Tories and the SNP deserve to lose.”

Instead, he added, they would need to set out to voters why they deserved to win

I’m sure he meant it at the time, but right now Scottish Labour is still very much on the why the SNP deserve to lose part of that strategy.

The problem for Sarwar is that the closer we get to the election, and indeed the closer the polls show him getting to Bute House, the more he’ll have to start speaking about Labour in Government. 

Both what they’re doing in government in London and what they’ll do in government in Edinburgh. 

The first question he has to answer is what he’ll do about the winter fuel payment. 

On Monday I was at an event for the Aye Write book festival with former Labour spindoctor Alastair Campbell and Keir Starner’s biographer, Tom Baldwin.

One of the most powerful moments of the night came, as it often does, during the audience Q & A. Lynn, a recent widow, told the gents she really wanted to vote Labour at the general election. 

But she didn’t.

“I couldn't bring myself to vote for them.”  She was, she added, worried about Keir Starmer’s warning of a ‘Things can only get worse’ budget. 

She said she and her late husband - who required round-the-clock care and a warm house - would have lost their winter fuel payment. 

It’s not just the means testing, it’s the strict criteria of that means testing. Only those on pension credit are eligible.

Not all of the 900,000 Scots pensioners losing the payment will struggle without the cash, but it will be a hard winter for many thousands.

And despite his best efforts on Tuesday as he and finance spokesman Michael Marra shared a “dossier” explaining why the Scottish “budget crisis” was the SNP’s government’s fault, this is on Labour.

It’s not entirely fair of me to put Labour's success down to luck. 

It takes more than luck to go from fifth with less than 10% of the vote as the party did at the European election in 2019, to winning 37 MPs with 35% of all votes as they did in July. 

But if he wants to win in 2026, he's going to need some better answers for people like Lynn.

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