I COULD have walked. It wasn’t quite a plan, but I’d made provision in time and boot to walk from North Govan (known as Partick) back home.

The sun was out, and I was ready to go, but got a little distracted in conversation with Comrade Stoddart. Now we are on the No 3 bus.

“It’ll be a mystery tour,” he said. The first and greatest mystery is why I boarded at all. At least Keith has a bus pass — all I have is a card to enable First to extract an indeterminate amount from my bank account.

It’s all right for some.

Zig-zigging through the grid of Glasgow’s middle, the wheels on the bus are still taking me further from my destination. Neither of us are prone to gossip outside of gossip time, so we make the best of the boil-in-a-bus hayride.

Nonetheless vigilance is always required, lest we accidentally spill state secrets to our fellow travellers.

Safe in the knowledge that no-one else on the bus will even be aware of its existence, much less actually care, the struggle for the Scottish Labour succession forms the thread weaving its way through the seemingly random historical tidbits.

A elderly woman with a trolley gets on the bus. We wait to see if the man perched on the outside of his bench with a book will make way. For seconds we hang on in baited breath. Will he look up or will he keep his nose in the book and hope she will pass him by?

He fidgets as the inner turmoil builds. The book falls to his side and he slides over. The bus breathes again.

What exactly goes on with the Scottish Labour leadership contest? I explain the rules. Three MSPs, three MPs and three affiliates — two of whom must be trade unions — are needed to nominate some poor souls before they can get on the ballot paper.

In all the excitement, many seem to have missed that this is a baby-step forward for trade unions in Scottish Labour, until now they have merely offered supporting nominations alongside the real clout of recommendations to their political levy-paying members and often hefty funding to their preferred candidates. Only their soft power helped shape the ballot paper in the past, now they almost have a collective right of veto.

There’s a kerfuffle. Trolley woman and detective book man have entered into debate. The bus falls into silence once more as everyone tunes in. She wants the window seat now and appears ready to kill to get it.

A few moments of stubbornness stop him from returning to where he had started, but presumably concluding that life is short enough, he relents and stands up. She slides across to the window. With her trolley. He stares at it, unable now to sit down at all. She gazes out the window. He chooses life and gets comfortable on his feet.

Back in the world of dreams, the runners and riders to succeed Mr Sarwar come up. Well, to get on the ballot papers at least. They’ll all find enough nominations in the trade unions, I fancy, but Joe Fagan and Michael Marra have hoovered up most of the parliamentary nominations, leaving Monica Lennon with one MSP and one MP to find by Monday’s deadline.

Should she fall short, then it’s a ballot paper without a woman, and a ballot paper without an endorsement from Campaign for Socialism — issues that should matter in 2026 — but life and politics are more complicated than that. People leave the field on their own two feet or are carried out on a stretcher to clear the way, aeons of compromise upon compromise leaving a coalition built on compromise well… compromised.

A young family get on. Space is found for the buggy and mother sits by it while big sister perches to watch her energetic toddler sibling. Running about, bouncing over the potholes that periodically send the tin can into a bone-shaking shudder, grinning away and singing without a care in the world.

She brushes up against the trolley. “Don’t touch that, away and sit down.” Having the advantage of being three foot tall, she attempts to take the seat detective book man was evicted from. “Not there.”

The bus is quietly disgusted, but we resort to expressing it to one another rather than the trolley woman, who now won’t take her eyes off the little girl and probably wouldn’t hear us anyway. A collective cowardice.

There’s a gallows humour inside Labour about the whole election, even holders of public office — whose blushes I will spare — joke that the outcome isn’t all that important given just like the bus service of our dreams, there’ll be another one along at any moment. Worse still, is that every single person in the parliamentary party in their heart of hearts knows why.

They have a point. With there being 11 Scottish Labour leaders since devolution, eight since losing power in 2007, average life expectancy stands at just two years, four months and 11 days.

Through the decline in seats at every Holyrood election, and the decline in membership to such an extent that it now stands on a par with the Scottish Greens at around 11,000, the common thread has been the person sacked for plotting against by every leader but Anas Sarwar, the now acting leader Jackie Baillie.

It’s not all her fault of course, she just happens to represent a way of looking at politics that has, with few exceptions, left local parties — once lively forums for debate in party and community — reduced to moribund mechanisms to select candidates she has selected.

The child bumped her head on a pole. “That’s your own fault, I warned you,” said trolley woman.

At the dawn of Sir Keir’s farcical leadership his inept committee of scriptwriters invited people who hadn’t expected him to routinely lie, rig selections, or hand hundreds of thousands of pounds of party funds to his pals, to leave — infamously telling them the “door is open.”

It was perhaps his only bit of advice taken to heart by hundreds of thousands of people across Britain.

In Scotland though, the party has become so accustomed to decline over the last two decades that 7,000 more walking away in five years was barely seen as a cause for comment, much less actual concern.

When I hear nationalists claim that Scottish Labour is merely a branch office in tow with “London Labour,” it always raises a wry smile.

If only they knew the truth Scotland had led the way.

The exceptionally lucky Baron Haughey, who thinks multimillionaires like himself are overtaxed and teamed up with Baillie to force Richard Leonard out of the Scottish leadership, has backed Fagan.

Without so much as a glance at policy, that would normally be enough to secure victory.

We shall see, but whoever takes on the role needs to shake off these chains. Lennon has called for Baillie to go, and the deputy role to be split — one place for a councillor and one for an MP.

The latter may be desirable, but the former is absolutely necessary, something that is — however belatedly — beginning to dawn on the wider parliamentary party, if not on Dame Jackie herself.

One person’s exit solves nothing itself — won’t magically return Scottish Labour relevance overnight — but if it allows space for a shift to the priorities of class over capital then it’s what must be done.

Over an hour later we reach the Argosy on Paisley Road West, my stop.

Thanking the driver I step out into the fresh-ish air.

Trolley woman now sits alone, guarding that extra seat on an empty bus like her life depended on it — determined to go full circle.

Who knows why?