With polls almost all predicting a hung parliament at next year’s UK general election, every seat counts. So the beleaguered Labour Party must have had hopes of securing a constituency like Gordon in Aberdeenshire.

The Lib Dem incumbent Malcolm Bruce is stepping down, almost certainly taking his substantial personal vote with him, and the party’s choice of replacement, ex-BBC journalist Christine Jardine, managed to pull in just 1,940 votes in neighbouring Aberdeen Donside when she stood there for the Scottish Parliament last year.

In 2010 Labour came third in the seat, but just 1,016 votes behind the SNP, and with Scots traditionally inclined to back Labour at Westminster elections Gordon would surely have had to be down as a winnable target for Ed Miliband.

So the Labour candidate selected to contest the seat – before Alex Salmond had declared an intent to stand, making the Nats hot favourites – is quite an eye-opener.

So far as we’re able to ascertain, 22-year-old Braden Davy had never even been to Scotland until 2012. Born and brought up in Northumbria, in 2011 he was still studying at Durham University, during which time local paper the Morpeth Herald revealed that he was active in a campaign for people to enter their nationality as “Northumbrian” rather than “British” in the UK census of that year.

It wasn’t the youngster’s first flirtation with the dreadful evils of nationalism and separatism. The previous year he’d announced his intention to form “a political party dedicated to the North-East” on a local blog. And sure enough, he did just that, using it to fulminate against Labour’s favouritism towards Scottish and Welsh students.

A keen proponent of devolution for the area, he nevertheless wasn’t in favour of the proposed regional assembly that had been resoundingly rejected by the electorate back in 2004, describing it as “a massive white elephant” and the work of “a smarmy Labour government” in a forum post in December 2011.

Still, he evidently got over his complaints about the party (and the desire to set up his own) pretty quickly, as by the very next month he’d left university early and moved to the Aberdeen area to work as a Labour election agent and (unsuccessful) candidate in the local council elections.

After a brief career diversion at McDonalds, he was soon back with the presumably no-longer-smarmy Labour, decamping to London in early 2013 to work at Westminster for Anne Begg, an MP with a fondness for campaigning alongside the National Front.

Of course, youngsters are especially prone to what we believe is politely known in Labour circles as “evolving” their beliefs. For example, in that same Morpeth Herald piece in 2011, Master Davy had noted his strong distaste for the idea that parties should campaign on a “vote for us to keep the other guy out” ticket rather than on the strength of their own policies:

But by the time Labour selected him for Gordon, that view had altered slightly:

Not everyone in the party shares the same opinion, of course. Despite the narrow gap between Labour and the SNP in Gordon and the weak Lib Dem candidate odds-on to lose the seat, former Glasgow Lord Provost and Scotsman columnist Michael Kelly today advised his star-studded Facebook friends list (including such luminaries as former Scottish “leadership” team Johann Lamont and Anas Sarwar, ex-First Minister Jack McConnell and shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran) to vote Lib Dem to defeat Salmond, rather than for Braden Davy.

But why bring all this up?

For Labour to have selected such a hapless candidate – an obnoxious young man barely out of short trousers, who’s hardly spent five minutes of his life in Scotland, with an embarrassing internet history – for what was at least nominally a winnable seat suggests that the party’s suffering from a catastrophic shortage of talent far more severe than anyone had previously imagined.

That’s an impression hardly contradicted by other recent misadventures in personnel, like the fiasco of the deeply unpleasant Kathy Wiles – who we exposed earlier this year, leading to her hasty deselection – or indeed today’s news that John McTernan, of all people, fancies himself to take over Alistair Darling’s current seat in Edinburgh.

We’ve been, and remain, sceptical about the more apocalyptic predictions based on recent opinion polls which suggest Labour could find its number of Scottish seats reduced to single figures next May.

But if Braden Davy is the grim calibre of candidate the party is now reduced to putting forward for seats that were by any reasonable definition up for grabs in a super-tight election, perhaps anything is possible.