JEREMY Corbyn will not have a major role in Scottish Labour's campaign for the Holyrood elections, it has emerged.

Despite saying shortly after he won the UK leadership that he would be campaigning "a lot" north of the border ahead of May's vote, Scottish leader Kezia Dugdale said of the left winger: "he’ll be there but not a whole heap".

She made the comments in an interview with a magazine produced by the Progress faction of the party, which is often seen as Blairite with the publication billing itself as the "magazine of Labour modernisers".

Ms Dugdale insisted that despite polling suggesting that Mr Corbyn has negative approval ratings in Scotland, he will prove an asset in the weeks ahead. The Lothians MSP also said she got on "really well" with the UK Labour chief, despite her warning during the leadership campaign that a Corbyn victory may leave the party "carping from the sidelines."

She added: "The best thing Jeremy can do for me is to come up and talk about how the SNP aren’t actually an anti-austerity party... he gives people a sense of hope and faith that politics is a force for good. But it’s not Jeremy’s job to fix the Scottish Labour party. That’s my job."

The Scottish Labour leader, who has already said she expects her party to finish second in May, said she would not judge success or failure in the election by the number of seats she won. Instead, she said, she wanted to ensure people have "a much clearer sense of what the Labour party is about in Scotland now."

She revealed that she has also built good relations with Carwyn Jones, the Labour First Minister of Wales, with their teams having a direct line to each other for the first time.

An SNP spokesman said: "The SNP are taking nothing for granted in this election but it is odd that Mr Corbyn's visits are being scaled back considering the prominence given to the previous announcement.

"Perhaps he wants to avoid having to explain what Labour's policy on local taxation will be considering Labour's failure to come up with a policy for nearly a decade."