IN the tired hours before sunrise at the BBC’s Pacific Quay headquarters yesterday morning few were surprised at the identity of some Labour professionals in the BBC’s election cafe who celebrated the demise of Alex Salmond. Scotland’s finest First Minister, after all, had spent the latter part of his 30-year political career pushing the Labour Party north of the Border to the edge of political oblivion.

One former SNP staffer was sanguine at the bitter glee that greeted the downfall of his old boss. “Look,” he said, “Alex is a hardened campaigner who took no prisoners. Having suffered at his hands for so long his opponents are entitled to celebrate his defeat. It’s politics.”

The scenes of barely suppressed jubilation among Scottish Labour stalwarts at Mr Salmond’s defeat eclipsed any gritted joy they may have felt at Jeremy Corbyn’s UK-wide success.

Some of the current and former Labour politicians in the BBC spin room had spent most of the last two years reviling Mr Corbyn and participating in plots to remove him as leader. They accused him of destroying “the party that they loved” and of making it unelectable in the process. They also drew comfort from the knowledge that a sizeable and sullen Blairite faction at Westminster was itching to be rid of this meddlesome Marxist who clearly didn’t know his place.

What most irked them, of course, was the prospect of belonging to a Labour Party returning to its socialist roots and obliging them to re-learn an old language they had conveniently forgotten. They had grown accustomed to puttering about in the centre ground offending no one and collecting salaries and pensions beyond the sums their limited abilities would have commanded in the real world.

Mr Corbyn’s desire to take Labour back to its origins campaigning for social justice without compromise challenged their comfortable lives. They weren’t up for the fight.

Consequently, a few of the more conscientious Labour MSPs were the recipients of a blistering warning from Holyrood party managers for the crime of voting for Mr Corbyn in the party’s leadership contest. How dare they vote for the incumbent leader in a contest designed to dethrone him? Didn’t they know that such misplaced loyalty would only make things worse? He would soon be toast and they ought to have known that.

The Scottish leadership chose instead to make common cause with the privileged and wealthy elites who keep Britain docile and to denigrate their leader instead. It convinced itself that socialism was no longer welcome in Britain plc and that what was required was to manage poverty and inequality rather than end it.

That way, no one would be required to get their hands dirty and they could all proceed peacefully to their gilt-edged retirement plans.

Its complacency and acquiescence in the stratagems of the elites crying wolf over immigration and perfidious Europeans impelled many disillusioned supporters to swell the ranks of the Scottish Nationalists.

To them, Scottish independence was always less important than achieving lasting social justice throughout the UK. With the party they loved appearing to give up the fight, trying to achieve it in an independent Scotland was better than nothing.

Like most of us, they were agog at Scottish Labour’s decision to join with the Tories in opposing a second independence referendum. Only one party in Scotland looks comfortable in red, white and blue. Thus the party had chosen what it considered the easier path to halting the winnowing of its core support.

Rather than stand and fight the SNP on its failures to deliver a better NHS and to address educational inequality, it stood once more on a platform with the Tories. Three years earlier a similar decision had yielded an apocalypse.

Ian Murray, Labour’s sole Westminster MP, participated in the risible attempt by the Blairites to overthrow Mr Corbyn. At Holyrood, Kezia Dugdale refused to support her leader and suggested he do the decent thing and resign.

At a Scottish Labour fundraiser in Glasgow at the end of last year Mr Corbyn was absent. The party’s director of communications struggled to provide an explanation as to why the UK leader could not be present at the party’s most important fundraiser, an event he had attended the previous year.

This morning, though, both Ms Dugdale and Mr Murray should be on their knees thanking the almighty for Mr Corbyn. Mr Murray, whose presence in the House of Commons thus far can most charitably be described as spectral, was returned in Edinburgh South with a spectacularly increased majority.

The position of Ms Dugdale, who was facing the prospect of two barren Westminster innings, was fast becoming untenable. She is now safe following a Labour recovery of sorts this week that delivered seven seats, albeit still leaving the party as the third force in Scottish politics. Its escape owed everything to Mr Corbyn and nothing whatsoever to its wretched stewardship.

Clearly, Mr Corbyn’s thrilling and bold campaign across England and Wales had resonated with many former Labour voters in Scotland. After several years watching the party they loved turn into the Liberal Democrats (minus the charisma) they had a reason to back it once more; a cause to fight and a leader for whom social justice is a fight and not a speech.

Mr Corbyn and his most senior party loyalists, who had previously been discouraged from visiting Scotland, should turn their gaze towards it and call Ms Dugdale, Mr Murray and their superannuated team of advisors to account.

The Labour leader came within a whisker of causing the biggest electoral upset in British political history, garnering 40 per cent of the vote in a contest that was expected to finish him. The last time Labour in Scotland behaved like a party of the Left it won 41 Westminster seats in 2010.

A similar total this time would have taken Mr Corbyn past the 300 mark and an outside chance of forming a government. He is entitled to conduct a thorough investigation into the conduct of Labour in Scotland.

There is a realistic chance of another election before the year is out as Theresa May’s crippled administration is picked off by the leaders of the 27 remaining EU countries in the Brexit negotiations due to start next week. Mr Corbyn will go into it with his leadership secure and facing a government in full retreat and propped up by rednecks. And he will do so with a message and a style that has caught the imagination of the party’s former supporters.

He doesn’t need me to tell him that 59 Scottish seats could determine whether or not he secures the keys to Number 10. And he doesn’t need me to tell him that, under the present Labour leadership and executive in Scotland, he will never be able to bank on winning more than a handful of those seats. For, even if Ms Dugdale, Mr Murray and their strategists commence dancing at last to Mr Corbyn’s tune after years of disparaging him, who in Scotland will be convinced?