ABERDEEN South was always an entirely avoidable by-election for the SNP, although it could only have been averted by Stephen Flynn choosing to settle for an ongoing career at Westminster and passing up the chance to become a minister in the Scottish Government.
Some SNP supporters may now wonder whether that would have been a sacrifice worth making to avoid letting the Scottish Tory genie back out of the bottle in the north east, because the risk of defeat was far from unforeseeable.
