This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:

On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.

In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.

(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)

Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.

But while it’s valuable to keep things in some sort of perspective, the SNP shouldn’t be too complacent about that reality. The defining characteristic of this election was closeness. After the tsunami of 2015, only one Scottish seat – Ian Murray’s – was won by a five-figure majority, and only 10 by more than 5000 votes. (See table below.)

Murray’s result in particular was enormously suspicious. The Tories should have been in very strong contention – having comfortably won the equivalent council seats just a month ago – but fielded a paper candidate, did no campaigning, and finished in third place, almost 17,000 votes behind Murray. The seat that had been Scotland’s most marginal on the day of the 2015 election was its safest barely two years later, even though Murray had spent most of that time bitterly attacking the Labour leader whose success revived the party.

Tactical voting, a spectacular failure in 2015, in fact worked amazingly well this time – there was not a single seat in Scotland where two Unionist parties took 1st and second places. In every seat, despite no public movement, Unionist voters somehow knew which candidates to vote for to have the best chance of getting the SNP out, as noted on Friday by one Aberdeen Evening Express reporter.

And that remained the case even when the answer seemed wildly counter-intuitive. The BBC’s exit poll, for example, had Gordon as a 51-49 race between the SNP and the Lib Dems. In fact the Tories came through from 21,000 votes behind in third place in 2015 and won the seat, with the Lib Dems almost 16,000 votes adrift in fourth.

The only rational explanation for that is that there must have been direct, nationwide, covert (but perfectly legal) collusion between the three Unionist parties at a high level. But the even more remarkable thing is that the election was still so finely balanced that the result could easily have been dramatically different in either direction.

Thanks to the magic of First Past The Post, just 3,385 extra votes across the whole of Scotland could have seen the SNP take 41 seats – nearly 70% of those available, compared to the 59.3% they actually won.

But on the other hand, a mere 3,504 extra Unionist votes could similarly have reduced the SNP’s cohort to just 24 seats – barely 40% of the total.

(And indeed, just 1,799 more votes would have given the SNP two-thirds of seats, while it would have taken only 619 to drop them below the majority threshold of 30.)

When you consider that the average single Scottish constituency in a Westminster election sees somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 votes cast in it on the night, you begin to understand how incredibly fine those margins are. A spread of 6,889 votes – just 0.2% of the 2.65m cast on Thursday – covered a range between the SNP winning a crushing 70% or a disastrous 40% of the seats.

Now, it could be that this election marks the high-water mark of tactical voting. Labour supporters may be less willing to lend their voters to Tories next time, having seen the DUP-controlled UK government that has resulted and how close Jeremy Corbyn came to being able to pull together a progressive alliance that would have made him PM.

Similarly, Tory voters may be less likely to let the likes of Ian Murray have a free ride given that the seven seats Labour took in Scotland effectively cost Theresa May her majority – winning them all would have given her 325 UK seats, just enough for a sole administration (and more so when the vacant Sinn Fein seats are taken into account).

But the SNP’s blood will be running cold at the thought of what happens if Thursday’s pattern is repeated whenever the next election comes around – which could be very soon. And as we said in the wee small hours of Friday, they definitely can’t afford to count on getting a pro-independence majority in the next Scottish Parliament in 2021.

If another referendum is to happen in the next decade, the clock is very much ticking.