When leaders resign there are set responses which normally come from political foes and friends alike.

Fine qualities, often hitherto undiscovered, are focused upon as people try not to appear ungenerous in response to a fallen figure.

I am not at all sure that Jim Murphy will attract such a reaction. Certainly not from within the shell-shocked Labour Party itself.

Partly that is because he is staying around for another month, not to run the country as I did last year, but to produce a Labour Party report which his many internal opponents are sure to regard as an attempt to fix the election of his successor.

It is also about how Jim conducted his politics, internal and external.

For example, a well known Labour Party figure from Glasgow told me during the referendum campaign last year that Jim Murphy wasn’t so much campaigning against Scottish independence as against the then Labour leader Johann Lamont and in favour of Jim Murphy.

“He’s after Johann’s joab” bemoaned my friend.See also:Alex Salmond accused of ‘graceless’ response to Jim Murphy resignationAnd so it came to pass that last December Jim Murphy duly became Labour in Scotland’s FIFTH leader since 2007, after an explosion of rage from his predecessor when she memorably described London as treating Scotland as a “branch office”.

I remember exactly where I was the day that Jim finally achieved his leadership ambitions.

It was a Saturday in Glasgow and I was auctioning my First Ministerial memorabilia for Scottish charities.

I was interviewed at the auction and asked what would happen to Labour under his leadership.

I replied “nothing much”, given his antagonistic attitude to people during the referendum.

I was wrong. Murphy made things much worse for Labour.

All in all, and even counting the next four weeks of twilight zone status, he will have lasted a mere six months in post, less than half of the time of the ill-fated and heavily underrated Henry McLeish when he resigned in 2001.

In that brief time Jim managed to lose all but one of Labour’s 41 MPs.

To lose one MP may be a misfortune but to lose 40?

Of course his defence has been that the rot had set in long ago and he was merely reaping the whirlwind.

Maybe so, and certainly campaigning shoulder to shoulder, hand in glove with the Tories last year is the biggest single problem for Scottish Labour.

People don’t forget that sort of thing.

Murphy was part of that problem not any sort of solution.

People were worried about the direction of the Scottish Labour Party.

Under Murphy’s direction it was neither Scottish nor Labour and they certainly were not having a party.