The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.

Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.

(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)

But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.

Because in Scotland, the Corbyn resurgence simply didn’t happen. While Labour did gain six seats, none of them were due to a massive rise in its vote. In fact, despite starting from the most cataclysmically disastrous result in its history, Scottish Labour managed by several measures to LOSE ground – finishing third in a Westminster election, and coming behind the modern Conservative Party, for the first time ever.

Whereas Labour votes had increased by 40% in England and Wales, the figure in Scotland was a feeble 1%. (And 70% of those extra votes came in a single seat, Edinburgh South, which the party already held.) As we’ve noted previously, for every FIFTY votes the SNP lost this year Scottish Labour collected just ONE.

But none of that has stopped an incredible outpouring of hubris from both Kezia Dugdale’s branch office and a Scottish media unable to control its bitter resentment of the SNP’s decade-long dominance.

Dugdale herself penned an extraordinary article for the Edinburgh Evening News about her “success” in coming third and the “message” she’d sent to Nicola Sturgeon.

“We won seven seats because we offered a vision for hope and change”, she trilled, overlooking the fact that (a) that was out of 59, and (b) Labour actually won the seats because of how far the SNP’s vote fell rather than how much Labour’s went up – its total combined net gain in the six seats it captured was just 4000 votes, and in none of the six did the gain amount to even a third of the SNP’s 2015 majority.

But Dugdale’s fanfare on her own trumpet was echoed and amplified by a willing press. Julia Rampen of the New Statesman rushed to her defence with a piece about her “quiet victory” that had readers all over Scotland rubbing their eyes and trying to decide which of its claims was the most outlandish.

(Wings readers, spoiled for choice, eventually plumped for the phrase “Scottish Labour and its leader are poised to win once more”.)

But Rampen wasn’t done yet. She followed the article up with a pair of hagiographies of new Scottish Labour MPs – we suspect more may be in the pipeline – starting with Midlothian’s Danielle Rowley (daughter of the branch office’s deputy leader Alex Rowley) and new shadow Scottish Secretary Lesley Laird.

Rowley offered the thought that her victory was down to Corbyn’s manifesto, telling Rampen “Whenever we had younger voters on the doorstep, they were excited about the manifesto. Even some of my friends who hadn’t voted were excited about it.”

That excitement presumably explained the 1,864 extra votes Rowley managed to get Labour, which would have still left the SNP with a majority of 8000 had it not shed 6000 to the Tories and 3000 more to voters who simply stayed at home, letting Rowley creep in by just 885. (Labour’s 2010 majority in the seat was over 10,000.)

Rampen’s glowing tribute to Laird, meanwhile, managed to entirely overlook the fact that she actually LOST 638 votes on Labour’s 2015 catastrophe, but thanks to an SNP collapse to the Tories and stay-at-homes snuck in by 259 in a seat that used to have a Labour majority of almost 100 times that (23,009 for Gordon Brown in 2010).

Laird and Rampen’s assessment that “former Labour supporters who voted SNP in 2015 have come back because they felt the policies articulated in the manifesto resonated with Labour’s core values” simply didn’t trouble itself with the inconvenient reality that every Labour supporter who walked away in the seat in 2015 seems in fact to have stayed away, and hundreds more have joined them. NOBODY “came back”.

The Guardian wasn’t about to be left out of all this fun either, producing an analysis of the result in another former Labour fortress, Glasgow East – a seat that the SNP actually retained. But the paper wasn’t letting such a minor triviality get in the way.

The story began with a tale of underdog heroism.

The only problem was that if a tide was turned in Glasgow East, it wasn’t Scottish Labour who were pulling off the King Canute act. The party gained just 220 votes in the seat – barely 1/20th as many as the Tories picked up from the implosion of scandal-hit former SNP MP Natalie McGarry, and only 1/50th of what it would have needed to overturn her 2015 majority.

But the Guardian piles on the breathless hyperbole anyway. The piece throbs with talk of “resurgence” and “the Labour surge” before coming up with its piéce de resistance:

The manifesto was a “gamechanger” in the sense that a last-minute-of-injury-time goal for a football side losing a cup final 2-0 is a “gamechanger” – that is, it didn’t actually change the game in any meaningful way, shape or form. Of the 6,068 votes Labour lost in Glasgow East in 2015, the gamechanging surge won it back less than 4%.

In other words, for every 25 voters Scottish Labour lost in Glasgow East two years ago, more than 24 of them stayed lost in 2017 and just one came back. For the whole of Scotland, the party won back one vote out of every 33. For the whole of Scotland excluding Edinburgh South, the figure is one out of every 113.

The three examples described in the New Statesman and Guardian articles are a pretty fair representation of the nationwide picture for Scottish Labour. They show one tiny vote gain (that failed to win the seat), one modest vote gain and one vote loss, which is the same pattern as in the rest of the country.

Yet each of the pieces portrays some sort of Lazarusesque, odds-defying comeback, when the reality was a massive swing to the Tories (and to the None Of The Above Party) that turned freshly-minted SNP majorities which hadn’t had time to bed in to rubble, and left dozens of seats vulnerable to whoever happened to be passing.

But as far as the media is concerned, and as Yes supporters have known for years, there is only one Unionist party in Scotland now. It simply goes by a set of different names according to the occasion.

Scottish Labour (aka UK Labour, aka Aberdeen Labour, etc) and its new cheerleaders ought to know how that works, and might be advised to reflect on what a meaningless charade it is, before they get too carried away with their own hype.