PAISLEY
Winner in 2016: George Adam (SNP)
IN the not-too-distant past, Paisley was Wendy Alexander country. At the inaugural Scottish Parliament election in 1999, Alexander was Labour’s next big thing and won the old Paisley North seat with a healthy majority of 17 percentage points over the SNP. By 2007, that had increased to 22 points, suggesting that she must have built up a substantial personal vote, because the national swing was sharply in the opposite direction.
Soon afterwards she replaced the former first minister Jack McConnell as Labour leader. If she had stayed the course as leader until the end of that parliament, she would presumably have carried her personal vote into the new unified seat of Paisley in 2011, and would have stood an excellent chance of being re-elected due to the traditional “leader’s bonus” (there would also, incidentally, have been an independence referendum in 2010 rather than 2014, but that’s a whole different story).