Sometimes, the best way to catch a politician out is to just let them keep talking. Jim Murphy forgot this basic rule when, on Sunday, he spent an hour shouting over Nicola Sturgeon in case she said something the voters might like to hear. He not only came across as incredibly rude and aggressive, he had to keep talking so much that he let his mouth get the better of him with his statement that Labour would not require to make additional cuts to public spending after next year.

This assertion was patently untrue as anyone who has been paying attention to politics recently will know. However, it went unchallenged until Monday when the two Eds, Milliband and Balls, revealed the truth, thereby more or less confirming that Murphy was, at best, attempting to mislead the scottish public.

The bold Jim went very quiet for a while but has apparently come back fighting, insisting that, while the Eds may be in charge of setting the Budget, he is in charge of how the Scottish budget is spent. This is an especially brave statement to make because, as with his earlier claim, it is patently wrong. It seems to have slipped Jim’s mind that spending in Scotland is decided by the Scottish Government in Holyrood and that Government is controlled by the SNP until 2016 when the next Scottish elections will take place.

These seem remarkable lapses of memory for a man who has spent his life as a politician. Perhaps the pressure is getting to him. After all, he’s just found out that he is nothing more than a Branch Manager.

So what happens next? Well, for Labour it seems they have written Scotland off already and Jim Murphy has been hung out to dry by the UK leadership. There is, though, a greater problem for others involved in this General Election campaign because the media are in a real quandary now.

The TV and newspapers did their best to downplay Jim being contradicted by his bosses but they couldn’t entirely ignore the story. However, it must be said that his exposure as a man who is prepared to mislead the public on a fundamental aspect of his Party’s policy should have gained rather more press outrage than it did. It seems, though, that the media decided it wasn’t as newsworthy as something dramatic like, say, an egg being hurled at the bold Jim.

The fact remains that the media have a big problem now. Their anti-SNP efforts can only go in one of two directions. They’ve already tried inventing stories to show the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon in a bad light but the French Ambassador’s Reception fabrication backfired quite spectacularly and it’s hard to see what else they can come up with that wouldn’t be so ludicrous as to be beyond the belief of even the most hardened Labour supporter or dyed in the wool Tory.

Which means al they can do is stick with Project Fear 2. They can’t suddenly change tack and present Jim as a pro-FFA politician, so they’ll need to fall back on the same old scare stories we heard last year. Over the next three weeks it seems likely we’ll hear more about risks to pensions, loss of investment, races to the bottom, etc., etc.. Either that or it’ll be back to warnings about alien attacks which would at least be more fun.

Speaking of attacks, have you noticed how the media are reporting on Russian ships in the English Channel? Does it seem odd to anyone else that we only hear these reports when Trident is in the news? Unless the Russians are in league with the UK Government it seems very coincidental that Russian ships or aircraft obligingly turn up whenever there’s a big protest against Trident. It’s almost as if the Government were feeding stories to the media whenever they think public opinion might be swayed. It could be that, like Jim, they’ve forgotten a basic rule which is that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. We’re listening to what you say and we won’t be fooled again.