Some manner of strange, alien vortex swallowed the very concept of arithmetic as we know it earlier this evening. The answer to the question “what is 431 minus 425?” was variously reported by the media as -7, -14, +31 and -30, with nowhere that we could find offering the seemingly obvious answer of “6”. But that was only the beginning.

Because language wasn’t immune from the sudden redefinitions either. The Tories, who finished 155 seats behind the SNP, nevertheless proclaimed themselves not only the winners of the election, but the sole winners.

So let’s have a quick review of the facts.

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1. The SNP won by the biggest margin ever.

In 2007‘s council elections the Nats came out top despite narrowly losing the popular vote, collecting 15 more seats than second-placed Labour. In 2012 they won the vote and more than doubled their lead to 31 seats. This year’s margin of 155 was exactly FIVE TIMES as big as the previous best.

(Though it wasn’t decisive enough for the Guardian, who put “victory” in quotemarks.)

(NB previous elections used FPTP rather than STV and aren’t comparable.)

2. The SNP more than doubled the number of councils where they came first.

In 2012 Labour were the biggest party in as many councils – 16 – as everyone else put together. This year the SNP took the top spot in 19, almost three times as many as all the Unionist parties combined.

3. The SNP won in all four of Scotland’s main cities.

Nearly 30% of Scotland’s population lives in its four biggest cities – in descending size order, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. In 2012 Labour won the most votes and seats in the biggest three, with the SNP taking only the baby of the bunch, Dundee. In 2017 the Nats got the most votes and the most seats in all four.

4. Different elections are different, and the SNP have multiple peaks.

Pundit after pundit lined up on the nation’s TV screens to announce (yet again) that the result proved the SNP’s honeymoon was over, their momentum had ground to a halt, their trajectory was now downwards and “Peak Nat” was past.

Yet in 2012, having netted a whopping 45% in the previous year’s Holyrood election, the SNP got just 32% of first-preference votes in the council elections. In the 2014 European election they slid even further, to 29%.

But those falls were meaningless in terms of their overall popularity – come the next vote, the 2015 Westminster election, they rocketed to 50%, and at Holyrood in 2016 they won another landslide with their vote share just 0.6% down on the 2011 result. Since losing in 2010 they’ve won elections in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, with their vote share bobbing up and down considerably to no great consequence.

5. Deals are yet to be done.

The great Conservative resurgence delivered Ruth Davidson’s party just 9% of seats in Glasgow – 8 out of 85 – with the SNP taking almost five times as many: 39 seats, or 46%. The Nats will run Scotland’s biggest council, possibly in a coalition or informal alliance with the left-wing Greens which would provide a working majority. It’s difficult to see how that will make the Tories happy.

But elsewhere not a single one of Scotland’s 32 councils has a one-party majority. It remains to be seen who forms alliances with who. (Edinburgh was run by a seemingly successful Labour-SNP grouping and may well stay that way, except with the SNP in the top chair this time. Dundee will almost certainly stay under the control of the Nats, just one seat short of a majority.)

Minority rule can be made to work well, as the 2007-11 Scottish Government showed, having leveraged a single-seat plurality into a viable administration. The SNP, without actually having gained many seats but with the moral and practical force of now being the biggest party in two-thirds of the country’s councils, may well find themselves running considerably more of Scotland’s local government.

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The Tories routed Labour and now occupy second place at every level of governance in Scotland. There can be no disputing that Thursday’s election was a very good day for them. But only within very narrow parameters – the fact is that for all their bluster and crowing they barely laid a glove on the SNP, only their own team-mates.

The Nats watched over an increase in their vote share, seat count, victory margin and just about every other conceivable metric. The pro-indy Greens also picked up seats, while the Unionist vote simply cannibalised and reconfigured itself.

Spin is spin, but we know which of the two “victors” we’d rather be.