Kenny Farquharson: Voters get raw end of the deal-making

WHERE are my scissors? Ah, good, here they are. Now, give me the ribbon. Ta. Everybody ready? Okeydokey. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it gives me great pleasure to declare the 2011 Holyrood election campaign officially open. No scratching or biting, please.

One fall, one submission or a knockout. God bless her and all who sail in her. Seconds out. Chocs away. Ignition. And they're off.

Yes, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but the journey to polling day on 5 May next year starts today. How do I know this? Because before a single manifesto pledge has been unveiled, before a single good idea for protecting or improving our quality of life has been posited, our political leaders are already lost in an unseemly scramble to carve up the Scottish Parliament election in advance.

You'll find all the evidence you need in this paper's news pages today. The Tories' ambition in the Holyrood elections last time round was to be, in Annabel Goldie's phrase, "the principal party of opposition in Scotland". That, it seems, is no longer good enough. Now they want a slice of power and are touting themselves as potential coalition partners. Meanwhile, Iain Gray is playing hard to get, dropping heavy hints that if Labour is the biggest party come next May, he might not bother looking for help from the Lib Dems to form an administration as before, and instead go it alone as a minority government.

The shape of the Scottish political landscape is shifting fast. We do not yet know how the new roles played by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems on the UK stage will influence how their Scottish counterparts present themselves over the coming months. But we can hazard a guess.

Let's take Labour first. In Ed Miliband's first speech as Labour leader he didn't mention the Lib Dems once, instead keeping his focus firmly on David Cameron. Fair enough, but that can't last. Labour's principal target will not be - as it was in Tony Blair's day - the softer fringes of the Tory party. Rather, it will be the bewildered Lib Dems who find they have inadvertently voted in a government intent on dismantling the state. Can Labour really attack the Lib Dems for going into a coalition in London and at the same time court them for a coalition in Edinburgh? It may be a contortion too far.

Gray may be on firmer ground when he claims Labour is temperamentally more suited to minority government than the SNP - more willing to form ad hoc alliances across party lines and tweak policies so that they can command majority support. That's certainly the lesson of the first eight years of devolution. One of the major disappointments of the Nationalists in power has been their unwillingness to do this - to find a Plan B for the reform of local government taxation, for example, with the result that the system's well-known iniquities still stand.But a minority government would be a big step for Labour, and Gray is right to be cautious about it.

As for the Scots Tories, their boldness in making a pitch for power at Holyrood is a direct consequence of what's happening at Westminster. If we can have a Con-Lib alliance for Britain as a whole, why not a Con-Nat alliance in Scotland, or even a Con-Nat-Lib grand alliance? Is that really unthinkable? The positivity is welcome, and overdue. The Tories' support for the SNP administration has been one of the most surprising features of Scottish politics post-2007, and there is no reason why, given the right enticements, it couldn't move into a new phase. (At this point I could make a gratuitously suggestive joke about tartan knickers, but I'm aware you may still be eating your breakfast.) The move towards a more autonomous Scottish Tory party, with a directly elected leader, will help in this transition.

Where does the SNP fit into all of this? Well, it's all a bit academic while the Nats still cling to their independence comfort blanky ("Alex, please give me your blanky. Mummy needs to put it in the wash. Look, it's covered in wine stains and splashes of gravy from Greggs steak bakes. Come on now, give it to Mummy..."). The SNP campaign for Holyrood in 2011 is in danger of having a distinctly Groundhog Day feel to it - the same manifesto of promises from 2007 that they failed to implement while in power, and the same constitutional cul-de-sac. If they want to take a partner for the coalition waltz, they'll first have to brush up on their chat-up lines. "Grab your portfolio, you've pulled," just won't do.

Salmond's decision to park the independence referendum for the time being is still proving enigmatic. No-one is quite sure what it signifies - even within the SNP there seems to be conflicting theories. The question is whether it now comes into play as a bargaining chip, potentially delivering the SNP a second four years in power.

While I admit to finding all this fascinating, at the same time I can't help but be disheartened by the way the campaign has kicked off. This gavotte around the options for power speaks of a politics that is all about positioning and arithmetic, about the bargaining of principle for self-interest. And yes, I accept that an element of this is inevitable in any system of proportional representation where one party is unlikely to gain a majority of seats at Holyrood.

But my hearts sinks at the prospect of a campaign where the battle of ideas is just a warm-up for the real business of deal-making and power-brokering, and the political currency is in various denominations of blame. And I look forward to the moment when we, the public, get a chance to remind the politicians who is really in charge, when we exercise our democratic rights and cast our precious votes.