You can almost hear the panic right at the very heart of the Westminster establishment.
One of their own the noble Lord Ashcroft has produced a series of constituency polls showing a dramatic move to the SNP. On the Ashcroft findings, the SNP are now challenging in every single seat in Scotland.
In addition, the Ashcroft polling suggests a statistical dead heat between Labour and Tory across the UK. Therefore, it follows that Scotland could call the tune in the next parliament.
All of this is just too much for Lord Baker of Dorking, who has put forward a novel idea.
Instead of allowing Scotland to decide who runs Westminster why don’t Labour and Tory get together in a “grand coalition” to keep these nasty Nats firmly in their place.
However, his hair-brained scheme is not so much Lord Baker as half-baked.
Right wing columnist Max Hastings put the establishment fears very clearly in an English newspaper the same paper once described by its own founder as giving its readers a “daily hate”.
Hastings ranted: “The terrifying prospect of the Scots ruling England is now all too real.”
Of course, people like Max have no difficulty whatsoever with the nightmare of the English Tory Party (thanks to their Liberal lapdogs) running Scotland with one solitary MP out of 59.
The panic in the breasties of the establishment figures shows the extraordinary political times we are now in.
The senior Tories are proposing something that has only previously been done once before in peacetime by Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald when facing a world depression.
That example did not work out too well for the Labour Party, which makes it all the more extraordinary that Lord Baker’s proposal has support from the ranks of rattled Labour. Backbencher Gisela Stuart MP and Dundee-born former Fife MP and Labour peer Baron Moonie of Bennochy is also backing Lord Baker of Dorking. Clearly, gaining a peerage results in people losing their senses.
One of the reasons Labour is in trouble is that it hi-fived it with the Tories throughout the referendum campaign.
Better Together has reaped a bitter harvest for Labour and now they have MPs and peers who want to cuddle up to the Tories in government.
You may remember Lord Baker. As plain Ken Baker he was Margaret Thatcher’s party chairman.
Not that he made too much of a fist of that, since it was during his term of office that she got stabbed in the back by her own MPs the same ones Baker was meant to be keeping an eye on.
Spitting Image, the satirical puppet TV show, used to portray poor old Kenneth in deeply unflattering terms.
But that is as of nothing compared to the raspberry he should now receive in Scotland.
We have had years of general elections being decided in England. Now, for the first time in a generation, the political stars are aligning to allow Scotland to get a real look-in.
That would mean an end to austerity economics, the pursuit of the living wage, cancellation of the new nukes as well as making sure the promises the “vow” that was made to Scotland during the referendum is now redeemed in full.
Some of these policies have big support in England and Wales as well as Scotland. They don’t like the cosy Westminster club any more than we do.
And that is far too much for the Tory and Labour establishment.
The very idea that the people might determine this election is really scary scary enough to propose the madness of this grand coalition.