A few days short of the winter solstice, Jim Murphy starts his first week as Labour’s leader in Scotland this morning. Should the rest of us care? Too right we should, if we value the union, though Fleet St has risen to the news of Saturday’s leadership win with its usual Brexit-style myopia. You don’t have to travel as far as the M25 to lose some of these people’s attention.

The Guardian’s intrepid Scotland correspondent, Severin Carrell – “Where in England do you come from?” yes campaigners would ask him. “Scotland,” he would reply – reports that Murphy spelled out his determination to “act in Scotland’s national interest” as he made his acceptance speech, reported here by the Guardian’s Libby Brooks. The Times’s London edition celebrates with: “Wipeout warning for Scottish Labour.”

That’s an interesting perspective because it reflects the metropolitan view that calculates a Labour defeat in Scotland at the 7 May general election as the best way of securing David Cameron’s re-election. Nicola Sturgeon, Alex Salmond’s successor as Scotland’s first minister, makes the same calculation: she needs the Tories to win in England too. Unlike the Times, whose editorial (paywall) is more sensible, Sturgeon wants to break the 307-year-old link.

As routinely reported, once-mighty Scottish Labour (the “least comradely leftwing party I have ever dealt with”, reports one well-travelled Scot) is in poor shape. It is said to have just 13,000 members compared with 92,000 claimed by the surging SNP, as disaffected voters peel off to the Nats in the same way that many have switched to Ukip in England.

Scotland too actually: Ukip has a Scots MEP and Nigel McFarage is ahead of Ed Miliband in the polls, but McKipper parallels are a very sore point with the SNP, which currently presents itself as a progressive force. SNP fellow-traveller Rupert Murdoch – “Crofter McMurdoch” as we call him here – does too. He can afford to see Sturgeon raise taxes for Scotland’s better-off because he has such good accountants in New York.

So Murphy, a former Scotland secretary under Gordon Brown with an interesting CV, has a hard task ahead, as he knew when he bravely decided to apply for the post vacated after the 55:45 no vote in September’s referendum (“neverendum”, as the wits now put it) by Johann Lamont.

She complained as she went that London Labour treated Scotland like a branch office, inadvertently illustrating why that might be the case. During the referendum campaign I lunched with her at a vibrant old people’s day centre in the shadow – literally – of what remains of Glasgow’s Red Road high-rise flats, whose final demolition as part of the Commonwealth Games was sensibly – see Ian Jack here – abandoned.

Lamont struck me, as she did others, as decent but not up to the task of holding wily Alex Salmond to any kind of effective account.

Murphy came up the hard way, a classic career politician (nine years a Strathclyde student but he never graduated), but tough enough to his “100 days, 100 towns” tour last summer and take a lot of “warm yes welcomes” without excessive assistance from Police Scotland, a force which knows who butters its bread nowadays.

As an abrasive figure, labelled a Blairite (that bastard Blair kept breaking Labour tradition by winning elections) as well as being a Celtic supporter (Scots for Catholic), he is seen by some as a divisive figure.

Well, maybe. But Labour has been poorly served in the top job at Holyrood since the death of that strange, quixotic figure, Donald Dewar, the “father of devolution” and briefly the first first minister (1999-2000) before his early death.

It’s an odd paradox; a lot of the gifted Labour politicians now leaving the stage came from Scotland: Gordon Brown, Blair (at a stretch), Robin Cook and Alistair Darling, Derry Irvine and Charlie Falconer, Dewar, John Reid and others, all under the shadow of the lost leader, the Highland-to-Glasgow lawyer, John Smith.

All but Blair spoke with Scottish accents and were proper Scots; they dominated cabinets in London, they created the 1998 devolution settlement, “the settled will of the Scottish people” as Smith grandly put it before his untimely death in 1994. Yet they neglected Scotland, much as Smith, Dewar and Cook fatally neglected their own health too.

So I was pleased to hear Douglas Alexander, shadow foreign secretary and another clever Scot, saying on the BBC that his party had dwelled too much on the past – de-industrialisation, Thatcherism, a legacy of poor health – and will now be back in “the future business” with a more positive story to tell.

It’s also worth noting that Murphy is a nuclear Trident man in the Attlee-Bevin-Bevan tradition. So am I, but Ian Jack made an eloquent case against it in Saturdays’s Guardian.

Positive. That’s the lesson of the referendum. My abiding memory of the campaign is of being in Kirkcaldy, Gordon Brown’s constituency and birthplace of the great economist Adam Smith on polling day. The weather had been pretty nice – it often is in Scotland, though cooler than the south – but it was pouring down when I spotted a grizzled man in his 50s striding through the rain in shorts. “You’ll be a yes voter, I expect?“ said I. Of course he was.

That’s the point. The yes campaign was scandalously dishonest in not telling voters: “ independence will be tough, but it will be worth it in the long run.”

It even ignored the falling price of oil, already busy wrecking its fragile budget plans. At $60 a barrel it is still is falling. “No one reports such things here, BBC Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to,” a well-informed Edinburgh friend told me recently. Centralisation of power by the Holyrood government is another of the paradoxes of devolution: police, councils, fire service, universities.

At least the yes campaign had a positive story to tell, dodgy though it was and buttressed by negative stories (straight from Labour’s Westminster playbook) about the “threat” to the NHS.

The no side’s story was too negative, stressing the risks, not the opportunities. Murphy knows that too and promises to put the need for a successful economy – the key to good public services – at the heart of his new story. Good.

But will he be any good? I’ve no idea. That’s the thing about leadership, you never know until they actually try to do it.

“Nothing prepares you for being leader of the Labour party,” John Smith once told me. The Roman historian Tacitus put it even better when he said of a failed-and-murdered emperor: ”He would have been a great ruler, if he hadn’t actually ruled.”

So we’ll have to wait and see. Labour is in desperate need of strong, confident leadership (Murphy is not even an MSP yet) and the formidable Nicola Sturgeon, also an unproven leader, is in need of an effective Holyrood opposition. Though she may not know it, it makes the system work better, Scotland’s as well as Britain’s.