They wouldn't - would they?

Well, well, well. From the file marked Tres Convenient we learn today that the official election register from last year's Glenrothes by-election has been 'lost'.

We only know this because the Scottish Nationalists, who were as surprised as everyone at the 7000 vote margin of the by-election, demanded access to said register after their activists on the ground the night of the vote expressed concern at the amount of late registrations for postal votes in the election.

Some analysts suggest that Labour received 400 per cent more postal votes - which are notoriously easy to fake - in the by-election than they did for the same seat in the General Election held only two years earlier. That's a lot of people on holiday at once.

And, as the Nats know, Labour has form on vote rigging using postals. It's been demonstrated in a court of law.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Glenrothes to Labour. They'd just lost another safe Labour seat - Glasgow East - to the Nats, had lost Crewe and Nantwich to the Tories in England and Brown was on the ropes. The word in the corridors suggested that if Glenrothes went, the bloke who held the neighbouring seat, one G.Brown, was going with it.

Am I saying Labour rigged the by-election? No. Am I saying it that it is a distinct possibility? Yes. Yes, I am. An inquiry, now launched, must be thorough and swift.

There's two main reasons why I'm suspcious. Brown broke with convention and campaigned in the seat numerous times and even sent the missus out to knock on doors. He simply couldn't afford to lose.

More tellingly, the Nationalist apparatchiks on the day were briefing that the election would be nail bitingly close: a margin of about 500 votes either way was their call. And they'd been on the money with such predictions in Glasgow East and the Scottish Parliament elections before that. It's hard to believe they'd be so spectacularly wrong in this case.

But still, politics is funny game.

I mean, who would have thought Her Majesty's Government would rip a PHD students thesis off the Internet and misrepresent it in order to dupe MPs into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq?

Still, what does that prove? Everything and nothing in equal measure.