Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Senior Labour sources in Scotland tell me the voters of Glasgow North East may have to wait until November before they get a new MP in succession to Michael Martin, who left the Commons when he stepped down as Speaker last month.

If the Labour whips were to call the by-election right now it would occur slap-bang in the middle of the school holidays. Labour thinks doing that last summer helped ruin their chances in the by-election in neighbouring Glasgow East, a supposedly safe Labour seat famously won by the SNP.

Under the rules Labour can't issue the writ for the by-election whilst the Commons is in recess. MPs won't come back to Westminster until 12 October 2009, which could mean an election on Thursday 12 November 2009. Technically they could hold it on 5 November 2009 but that's unlikely given the religious sensitivity of bonfire night in the West of Scotland.

"We want to hold the election quicker than that," my senior source says, "but there's nothing we can do about it. We can't hold it in the holidays again. We got a lot of criticism for that."

At the moment Labour is pretty confident of success. They claim that on the basis of the local figures in the constituency in the recent European elections - which were disastrous for Labour across most of Britain - they actually won in Glasgow North East.

But can Labour keep that up? The general rule in by-elections is the longer the sitting party waits, the more time it gives the challenger to gain the momentum to win.

A small footnote about my former Newsnight colleague David Kerr. He took voluntary redundancy from Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Scotland last week to try to become the SNP candidate for Glasgow North East. But then last night, sadly for him, the SNP picked someone else, perhaps because Kerr was seen as Alex Salmond's preferred man.

I first came across Kerr when he was the SNP candidate in the Falkirk by-election of 2004, when I said in my commentary, rather cheekily: "David Kerr used to be editor of Newsnight Scotland, so he should be used to small audiences."

My producer was having kittens during the editing of my film, and begged me to change the line, fearing the wrath of humourless Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ bureaucrats in Glasgow. In the event, nobody complained, partly because my film didn't go out in Scotland... but also, of course, because there are no humourless Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ bureaucrats in Glasgow.