WHEN Dorothy Parker was told that the reclusive former US President Calvin Coolidge was dead, the legendary New York writer and wit remarked:

"How can they tell?"

I detected much the same response here on learning that Johann Lamont had quit as Scottish Labour leader.

Ms Lamont had been under severe pressure since her lacklustre performance in the referendum campaign.

During the most important debate in the nation's history she was largely anonymous and was comfortably outshone by Nicola Sturgeon and even Ruth Davidson.

But her resignation still took many Scots by surprise. They didn't know she was also meant to be leader of the entire Scottish Labour Party, including their 41 Westminster MPs.

You can hardly blame the public for that, since her London masters didn't regard Ms Lamont as leader material, either.

Ed Miliband blocked her attempts at reforming her party.

She may have been Scottish Labour's top kiddie, but she and her Holyrood cronies were marginalised as the likes of Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy and Anas Sarwar arrived from London to hijack the Tories' Better Together campaign.

Ms Lamont suffered open sniping from her Westminster MPs, consumed by self-preservation after seeing thousands of voters in traditional Labour heartlands such as Glasgow desert the party in the referendum.

Senior labour sources believe that up to 15 of those MPs could lose their seats to the SNP in next May's General Election, which would kill Miliband's hopes of becoming Prime Minister, immaterial of the tandem Tory threat of "English votes for English laws".

The last straw for Ms Lamont was last week's axing by London of her Scottish general-secretary, Ian Price, without her being consulted.

Shown such contempt, she chose to resign, but she left with a ferocious broadside at Miliband and Co.

She accused him of treating Scotland like a "branch office" and she described some Labour MPs as "dinosaurs", too concerned about their own futures to accept that "the focus of Scottish politics is now Holyrood and not Westminster".

Still, it's pretty rich of Ms Lamont to complain about too much interference from London, when Scottish Labour was in bed with the Tories pleading with Scots to vote for exactly that.

As it happens, her description of Labour dinosaurs fits equally well here in Glasgow.

You may remember that after their disastrous referendum collapse, the City Council's Labour administration suffered a high-profile resignation of their own.

Aileen Colleran stepped down as chairwoman, predicting a voter backlash against Labour and warning that the party "couldn't pretend it's business as usual".

How right she was, but I doubt council leader Gordon Matheson was listening.

Ms Lamont's successor will be their seventh leader since the Scottish Parliament opened 15 years ago, and the fifth Alex Salmond has seen off since becoming First Minister in 2007.

The SLP have become like a once great football club whose inept board of directors hire and fire managers and blame them for their own failings.

If Ms Lamont is correct, and Scottish Labour is indeed nothing more than a Westminster branch office, then her replacement will be a Westminster MP rather than a MSP.

The bookies can't see beyond Blairite Murphy and Great Clunking Fist Brown who, not surprisingly, doesn't recognise Ms Lamont's description of his party.

Young Edinburgh MSP Kezia Dugdale is also being touted, but whoever is elected on December 13 - surprisingly not a Friday - will get a poisoned chalice.

Of course, it's easy to snipe from the sidelines, in the manner of one-time Labour First Ministers Jack now Lord McConnell and Henry McLeish.

McLeish claims to have seen Labour's decline coming "for a decade" and complains that "while we've had devolution of government from Westminster over the last 20 years, we've had no devolution of political power from the Labour Party".

Well, he was Scottish Labour leader until 2001 and McConnell followed him until 2007. Are we to believe that when they were in charge they did not suffer what McLeish now calls "this suffocating control of Westminster"?

Ms Lamont's exit has exposed a UK Labour Party in meltdown and her savaging of Miliband is an own goal for the Tories and SNP to exploit. I won't be alone in thinking that Labour is now leaderless on both sides of the border.

l Last week's column was inadvertently cut off in its prime. The ending should have read:

"If you won the lottery," a noted do-gooder was asked, "would you give money to the poor?"

"Of course."

"And if you had four cars, would you give one to your neighbour?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I've got four cars."