With less than a week to go before the Scottish elections, I think I speak for at least 14 people when I say this: thank God for celebrities. Where we would be without them and their political endorsements?

I will tell you where we would be - we would be lost. That's why political parties try so hard to get famous people to sign up as supporters.

They know that ordinary voters lie awake at night for hours grappling with big issues such as global trade policy and the implications of a pan-European defence programme.

"I wonder what Elaine C Smith thinks about how the world is run?'' they ask themselves as they toss and turn, and darkness turns into dawn, and the moment of decision with the ballot box gets ever closer.

"Local income tax - right or wrong? I wonder what that bloke Donald Macdonald, the boss of the Macdonald hotel and resort company, thinks?"

Well, thanks to a report in The Herald yesterday by our political editor Douglas Fraser, voters now know what Ms Smith and Mr Macdonald think. They think what the SNP thinks, mostly. And good luck to them both.

It's a free country, although seeing Mr Macdonald's name in the paper reminded me of the nights, a couple of years ago, that I spent in one of his hotels, the Rusacks in St Andrews.

The hotel wasn't free, of course, but if there was any justice in the world it should have been. Not since I shared a three-berth tent with 17 others at the 1985 Glastonbury festival have I endured such depressing sleeping conditions.

As for the breakfast - I wonder what the SNP policy is on over-priced, under-cooked bacon and service with less charm than Pete Doherty?

No doubt the bacon will be nice and crispy if, as the opinion polls increasingly suggest, the Nationalists get into power.

Of course, one should never believe opinion polls - particularly if they don't come up with the answer you want - but another, more scientific, method of assessing the parties' electoral prospects is to count the number of celebrity endorsement they have.

In which case, Nicola and Alex really do have something to smirk about.

Right now, Labour is woefully short of celebrity fans in the same way that I am woefully short of hair. There is a good reason for this. Celebrities don't want to be associated with failure. Political failure isn't hip.It isn't trendy.

No offence to Jack McConnell, who is a vastly underrated man, especially when it comes to playing golf off a handicap of 12, but right now he is about as hip and trendy as a pair of white terry-towelling socks.

It wasn't always like this for Labour. Back in 1997, pop stars and actors were tripping over themselves to be photographed standing next the groovy new Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Liam and Noel Gallagher were never out of the drawing room at 10 Downing Street, except when they were in the lavatory, of course.

It was the same story back in 1986. Maggie Thatcher might have been in power but those in the know knew the wind of change was blowing.

All the pop stars of the era were backing Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party, which is why so many of them signed up to play on something called the Red Wedge tour organised by Billy Bragg and featuring a wide range of musicians dedicated to political revolution and getting totally bladdered in the hotel bar after the gig every night.

This might come as a shock to anyone who has seen me wandering down Buchanan Street wearing my white terry-towelling socks, but back in those days I was a member of a rock band that was considered hip and trendy enough to be part of the Red Wedge tour.

We, like everyone else, were heartily sick of that old bat Thatcher.

But even more than our disillusionment with the Conservative government, we'd heard the Style Council would be on tour and someone in our band - OK, it was me - really fancied one of the backing singers in the Style Council. So we had to do the tour.

Of course, true love never runs smoothly and, as it turned out, the backing singer in question was married to Paul Weller. I remember being devastated at the time but as the weeks and months passed my wounds healed.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had helped to change the political landscape.

One year after the Red Wedge tour had taken Britain by storm, Margaret Thatcher called an election. Her majority at Westminster was slashed from 144 seats to a mere 102 and she returned to Downing Street, where she was even more insufferable than she had been before.

So much for those who say celebrity endorsements count for nothing when it comes to elections. The truth is they count for even less than nothing.