Alex Salmond called it a �50-year storm�. Out of a right bourach of missing postal ballots the victor of Gordon whipped up his ultimate dream.

Alex Salmond called it a "50-year storm". Out of a right bourach of missing postal ballots, a perplexing Holyrood voting slip resulting in stark mountains of spoiled papers and malfunctioning counting software which pushed the destiny of the last seven list seats from the Highlands and Islands into early Friday evening, the victor of Gordon whipped up his ultimate dream.

Labour was finally toppled from its post-1955 dominance of Scottish politics. By a single seat. The will of the Scottish people - or rather of that half (51.8%) of the electorate who bothered to vote - could not have been more delicately, or more provocatively, balanced. You could never dream up an endgame as deliciously choreograhed as this one.

Most of yesterday Mr Salmond had been redefining, on the hoof, what constitutes moral authority in today's swirling Scottish electoral politics. As his aim of capturing the largest number of seats seemed to be slipping from his grasp, the SNP leader started talking animatedly about who would emerge with the largest share of the vote.

In the end, thanks to a strong performance in the lists, the SNP did both. It beat Labour, by 47 seats to 46, and by the end led in votes in constituency and list ballots - by nearly 16,000 and 38,000 respectively. That dispenses with further semantics, but these margins are dwarfed by voters deprived of their franchise in the shaming glare of global attention.

Alex Salmond's storm may have unleashed, as he claims, historic winds of change the length and breadth of Scotland, but it has also left behind a turbulent political landscape, one none of our politicians, not even a man of Mr Salmond's considerable accomplishments, will find easy to tame.

What now constitutes a mandate in this third Holyrood Parliament when the party with the biggest block of seats and votes is backed by less than 16% of the Scottish electorate?

A mandate for radical reform of local taxation? A mandate to demand the lion's share of oil revenues be repatriated to Edinburgh? A mandate to test Scotland's appetite for independence? Or merely a mandate to stick to the smaller change of service delivery and prove to doubters that the new, untested ranks of Nationalist MSPs can out-deliver what went before?

Buoyed before Thursday by their party's seemingly-relentless poll lead, some in the SNP were expecting a real Labour wipeout. It didn't happen. Labour's net share of seats fell by just four. As prominent Nationalists wrenched first-past-the-post fiefdoms from old coalition incumbents, the lists fulfilled, for Labour, a purpose which has long served the SNP well.

It restored some kind of balance. Such is Labour's past neglect of the nuances of list politics, it also brings some complete unknowns into its depleted ranks. The SNP's biggest coup lay elsewhere, in wiping out most of the Greens and Independents and all of the socialists from the old chamber. Even its assault on Labour's west-central Scotland heartlands was fuelled by the absence, this time, of SSP and Solidarity candidates on constituency ballots.

That plunder is steeped in irony. The far-left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair and Iraq by backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in bringing the pillars of modern capitalism crashing down.

That said, having absorbed the electoral currency of Holyrood's old rainbow fringe, how might the SNP and its leader now play its strengthened hand? The arithmetic of effective coalition has been all but snuffed out. Even if he manages to persuade Nicol Stephen to park his distaste for independence and the promised referendum, and share power with the SNP, the numbers still don't stack up - 47 plus 16 makes 63. Not 65.

Mr Stephen's executive side-kick, Ross Finnie, may be minded to pitch for George Reid's vacant slot as Presiding Officer. So might another LibDem, Jamie Stone. So to achieve a bare working majority of 65, Mr Salmond needs not just all the LibDems, but the two remaining Greens too.

What can he offer? After such a historic breakthrough, he cannot contemplate ditching the promise of an independence referendum in 2010.

The SNP rank-and-file would never forgive him, but is a politician as resolutely opportunistic as Mr Stephen going to swallow the offer of other questions on that ballot paper?

How could he stand up against Salmond and argue for greater fiscal autonomy, greater powers for Holyrood or some other more gradualist strategy, and avoid being crushed in the process?

Might Mr Stephen not be minded, in his party's electoral circumstances after Thursday, to opt instead for a period of quiet contemplation on the back benches? It's where his party's performance in this contest surely points.

However, Alex Salmond does not relish running a minority administration, with the forces of unionism ranged all around him. Yesterday, he was talking of leading Scotland in the national interest, with "humility and passion". Whether he gets to do that may be determined, in part, by another major Scottish politician on the brink of a much bigger job. Gordon Brown was lurking in his North Queensferry lair yesterday, letting it be known he will "listen and learn" from the lessons of this Holyrood poll.

The next Prime Minister can ill-afford to try and activate that grand unionist coalition to try and prevent Mr Salmond becoming First Minister.

He has more than enough challenges elsewhere., and any attempt to confound the will of the Scottish electorate, however finely balanced, could reap a heavy political price. When seats are falling in his own backyard, he should advise Labour in Scotland to take to its time in opposition with good grace and learn the lessons of this reverse. A new politics is being shaped in Scotland, but one which, because of the arithmetic, falls well short of apocalypse.

There's an obligation on all sides, especially after the calamity of the mechanics of this poll, to find new and constructive ways of co-operating for the greater good.