Newington's Evan Williams looks at how the 2017 General Election campaign is playing out in Scotland.

Everyone already knows that the SNP will win the majority of the 59 seats up for grabs. Their iron grip on the 40 odd percent of the population who want independence remains as certain as it was at the start of the campaign. Natural conservatives who lent the party their support as a bulwark against Labour dominance in the 80s and 90s finally feel able to return home. That will cost the Nationalists a few seats in the Borders and the north east of Scotland. Otherwise there is nothing much to see here, move along please.   

This weekend saw the BBC Scottish Leaders debate comprised almost entirely of Scottish leaders not standing at the General Election (Patrick Harvey MSP, Green, is standing in Glasgow North and David Coburn MEP, UKIP, is standing in Kirkcaldy and Cowedenbeath). Even for political anoraks it was a somewhat turgid affair but for the intervention of a nurse forced to use foodbanks after years of pay freezes. SNP leader, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, dealt with the criticism straightforwardly if a little snippily. And that looked like that was the end of it.

Then the briefing started.

Those of us observing politics in Scotland are used to bad tempered exchanges on Twitter and Facebook. We expected so-called cybernats to have a go at the nurse and to look into her timeline with determined self-justification. What was unexpected was for the SNP in the spin room to join in. Joanna Cherry QC, who is standing for re-election (SNP, Edinburgh South West), began with a claim that nurses in Scotland are better off than in England - with the implication that the nurse should have been grateful.

What happened next though could just turn out to be the SNP’s very own “Gillian Duffy moment”. Joanna Cherry, seemingly dissatisfied that the ungrateful nurse angle wasn’t a winner, reached for Twitter and repeated a false allegation that the nurse was married to a Conservative councillor and was therefore an agent provocateur. Cherry quickly retracted and sort of apologised, but the damage was done.

Meanwhile David Coburn, UKIP, complained about the lack of Latin and Greek in schools.

The incident with the nurse probably won’t change anything much because unlike the 2010 election the margins aren’t that tight in Scotland: the SNP are a good 10 points ahead of the Conservatives and even further ahead of Labour.

But if the polls do change in Scotland we can all confidently put it down to this incident on an otherwise dull Sunday evening in Edinburgh. Beware, though, as David Coburn may or may not have learned at school – post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) is a logical fallacy. No matter: we have our story in an otherwise dull campaign so far.