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.
This is a constituency with a natural unionist majority, but one that Flynn was able to win for the SNP with less than 33% of the vote two years ago due to the Tories and Labour helpfully splitting the unionist vote straight down the middle.
The SNP's calculation this time was seemingly that unionist voters could be relied upon to repeat the favour by dividing their support between the Tories and Reform. If so, that was something of a wing and a prayer strategy, given that those voters also had the obvious alternative option of making the by-election literally unwinnable for the SNP by simply coalescing behind the best-placed unionist party.
That's precisely what they did: almost three-quarters of unionist voters plumped for the Tories, who as a result came close to securing an absolute majority of all votes cast.
Paradoxically, there's considerable comfort for the SNP in the sheer scale of the Tory victory, because it leaves them in no doubt that the modest four-point dip in their own vote was utterly irrelevant to the outcome.
Even if they had run the perfect campaign and their vote share had increased rather than decreased, they would still have lost heavily due to forces outwith their control, ie. industrial-scale unionist tactical voting.
Unionist commentators will nevertheless try their utmost to ascribe wider significance to the SNP's minor loss of support, and will suggest that it means the national result of the Holyrood election might have been radically different if only Peter Murrell's guilty plea had been entered a couple of weeks earlier.
But that argument is demolished by the impressive six-point increase in the SNP's vote share in the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry by-election.
If there really was a substantial Murrell effect on public opinion, it would be reasonable to expect to see it play out across different parts of the country, but instead an average of the two by-election results actually shows a slight uptick in the SNP vote since 2024.
That's consistent with the limited opinion poll evidence to date suggesting that the SNP have come through the Murrell scandal largely unscathed.
The real problem for the SNP in Aberdeen seems to have been much more localised and related to concerns about the future of the oil and gas industry.
The Arbroath result will be of enormous assistance to the SNP leadership as they seek to bounce back from the setback further north, because it's a statement of the obvious that Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is much more akin to a typical Scottish constituency.
In 2024 it was a straightforward SNP v Labour battleground, and neither the Tories nor Reform UK were ever going to be remotely strong enough there to fill the void for the unionist camp left by an eighteen-point collapse in the Labour vote.
If a general election had taken place this week, the SNP would undoubtedly have cleaned up in the overwhelming majority of Scottish seats, with Aberdeen South left looking like an aberration.
In an indirect sense, the Makerfield result may prove equally helpful to John Swinney, because its status as the "by-election of the century" will leave the media with much less bandwidth to publicise the Tory breakthrough in Aberdeen.
If Andy Burnham's unexpectedly commanding victory has enough shock and awe about it to convince Keir Starmer to resign as Prime Minister over the weekend, or generates enough momentum to finally get a challenge to Starmer's leadership underway by early next week, the outcome in Aberdeen could be all but forgotten in the blink of an eye.
However, in the long run, the even bigger significance of the Makerfield by-election for the Scottish independence cause may rest with the party that finished third.
Although Restore Britain fell short of predictions that they would act as the spoilers that handed the seat on a plate to Burnham, they nevertheless came of age by taking 7% of the vote and easily outpolling the Tories, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.
If they now bed in as part of an expanded UK eight-party system, they could deprive Nigel Farage of just enough votes to make it possible for left-of-centre parties to win a majority of seats between them at the next general election.
That might, if the stars align perfectly, hand the SNP sufficient leverage to finally break the logjam on an independence referendum.
