GLASGOW — One street, two meetings, and the essence of a country apparently undergoing a sedate, but real, revolution.

Buchanan Street - Glasgow's elegant, sloping answer to London's flat and tatty Oxford Street.

Meeting One.

Scottish Labour party leader Jim Murphy stands at the lower end of Buchanan Street for an election speech. Perhaps a dozen shoppers stop to listen. He leaves immediately after speaking, barracked by a couple of persistent hecklers. It is over.

Meeting Two

Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon — the "Sturgeonator" to her fans (yes, they do have t-shirts saying that) — stands at the upper end of Buchanan Street for an election speech. At least 1,500 gather. Nobody heckles. She stays around doing endless selfies and hand shakes.

It will take her 45 minutes and more to move 80 metres from her speech location to where the TV interviews are arranged, through the tightly-packed crowd keen to get a piece of Nicola. Real people, real voters - not the ghastly plastic crowd of party activists.

Sturgeon is a one-woman phenomenon the likes of which I nor Britain have seen.

Young "Sturgeonator" supporter in Buchanan St Glasgow pic.twitter.com/O905ZVgpAs — alex thomson (@alextomo) April 25, 2015

Easily the most effective UK politician. The most powerful conviction politician the UK has seen since Margaret Thatcher - a comparison she would hate but find it hard to disagree with.

Every time the terrified English establishment says she represents a "constitutional threat" ( something former Tory prime minister John Major said) or is simply "The Most Dangerous Woman In Britain" (The Daily Mail's take) her stock and that of the SNP surges yet even higher.

Across Scotland and across the weeks of campaigning, the opinion polls say one word: revolution. Labour in the past could rely on pulling in a big vote in Scotland. In this election, they could lose all 41 Labour Members of Parliament.

There were six SNP MPs in the last parliament. If you believe the polls there could soon be more than 50, with a poll from STV Wednesday predicting they're on course to win every Scottish seat.

Latest STV poll shows SNP winning every seat in Scotland -59 - a vote for Cameron says Jim Murphy — alex thomson (@alextomo) April 29, 2015

Compare this polling trend to last year's Scottish independence referendum when the polls said two words: silent majority. And the polls were right. Thus, the rather quiet No-to-independence vote defeated the passionate noisy Yes campaign, led by the SNP.

So Danny Alexander the chief secretary to the treasury and a Liberal Democrat heavyweight is fighting for his political life against a relative SNP unknown in the Highlands.

West of Glasgow, Labour's election campaign supremo and foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander (no relation) trails in the polls to a 20-year-old SNP candidate who is still a student.

At every TV debate voters across the UK say Sturgeon destroys every male party leader in sight - the Sturgeonator in action.

On the campaign trail, she is, quite simply, loved by the crowds who mob her in the streets. And the tiny, poised campaigner genuinely appears to love it all.

People snap photos of the leader as she campaigns. Image: Rex Features/Associated Press

Today while reporting for Channel 4 News, I witnessed people bringing her gifts. A boy, backdropped by the Forth Bridge, presented her with an SNP logo made of Lego.

It is effortlessly handed off to a press officer after an obligatory selfie. Exactly as the Royals might hand a present to a lady-in-waiting.

You can ask her (as I did that day on Buchanan Street) if is she a constitutional threat and in the same interview if she cut all the hair off her wee sister's doll (as media have reported) when she was a kid? She deals with it.

Buy hands The Most Dangerous Woman In Britain a Lego SNP symbol pic.twitter.com/4WScdxsu3y — alex thomson (@alextomo) April 28, 2015

Few voters seem to care on the streets whether her spending plans add up or whether her campaign is a ruse just to get another independence referendum back on the road.

It's the buzz. The engagement. That's the thing. There is an energy across Scotland since they lost this referendum, which quite simply we have not seen before in the UK in quite this way.

The Sturgeon effect - crowd awaits her launching gender equality policy pic.twitter.com/ZHoPe8LQdZ — alex thomson (@alextomo) April 25, 2015

In an election widely derided for plastic, risk-averse false "campaigning" with fake crowds - all this energy spills out and stands about. There is no denying it.

And what if? What if the SNP sweeps all before it and garners 50 or more Scottish MPs from its current six? Nicola said yesterday (and everyone calls her Nicola) that it's not a mandate for Scotland to go for independence. She insists that will take another referendum. But after the election do party leaders keep their promises?

That question amongst many is what freaks out the southern English establishment about Nicola and the Nats: Tory, Labour and LibDem.

What really happens post-election is still uncertain. Image: Rex Features/Associated Press

But equally, from a Scottish perspective how can the country be governed from Westminster if the polls are right and an SNP tsunami descends on London? Time and again Scotland has been governed by Conservatives who currently have one MP in the entire country. Should the SNP sweep all before them but still be shut out of any likely coalition government, or worse, an outright Tory victory - what then?

On Tuesday afternoon in the shadow of the magnificent Forth Bridge, yet again, Nicola Sturgeon has been painstakingly saying that should the whole country go SNP they'll be no mandate for independence.

We shall see. And when we look back to the autumn the feeling grows with every day that passes that, had Sturgeon run the independence referendum campaign and not the then leader Alex Salmond, they'd have won independence and none if this would be happening at all.

And consider this - during that campaign Salmond was widely considered to be the most effective politician in Britain by commentators north and south of the border.

Alex Thomson is Chief Correspondent at Channel 4 News. In more than 25 years, he's covered over 20 wars; led major investigations and continues to front the program from around the world. An award-winning journalist, he has written two books about the 1991 Gulf War and a travelogue about cycling across India. You can find more of Channel 4 News' election coverage here.