Scottish political leaders last night cemented a path-breaking coalition deal in the Edinburgh parliament after its second day of meeting.
The junior partners, the Liberal Democrats, battled long and hard through the evening over their leaders agreement with the Labour Party, with several Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) furious at the electoral risk they face as a result. But a vote of the 16-member group saw only three vote against.
The Labour Party leader, Mr Donald Dewar, had been elected during the afternoon as the First Minister of the new Scottish government, depending on the support of the Liberal Democrats.
He commented that the parliament had to look beyond its walls to the people of Scotland. The law requires that Mr Dewar's name is recommended to Queen Elizabeth for formal appointment.
An electronic voting system with teething problems, an end to adversarial seating on either side and much applause showed that the new parliament is going to be markedly different from the House of Commons, with its own sense of theatre already being established.
The new Scottish First Minister was given notice by opposition MSPs that he should act independently of the Labour government in London.
"We need a First Minister for Scotland who is going to speak for Scotland, rather than one who is going to act as Tony Blair's puppet", said Mr Dennis Canavan, a former Labour stalwart, now sitting as an independent.
The left-wing Falkirk MSP, who was rejected as a Labour candidate after 25 years' service in the House of Commons, humiliated his former comrades last week with the largest majority of any MSP.
He continued to embarrass Mr Dewar yesterday, after the First Minister had snubbed him, by forcing a public handshake.
Mr Dewar's party is nine seats short of a majority in the 129-seat legislature, so he has worked hard this week to secure a deal with the 16-member Liberal Democrats, led by Mr Jim Wallace.
The most contentious issue has been over student tuition fees, which the Liberal Democrats had promised to scrap during the election campaign.
The deal is understood to promise an independent review of student finance, including the £1,000 charge for better-off students introduced by the UK government last year.
That review would be within months, followed by a vote of the full parliament.
The deal has been hard won in a political culture unused to deals. While the Welsh Labour Party, also with a minority in the new Cardiff assembly, refused to do a deal with Liberal Democrats, the alliance in Edinburgh marks a significant step forward in Mr Blair's project to realign politics in the United Kingdom.
Mr Blair has said he wants next century to be as dominated by social democracy as the past one has been by Conservatives.
He has successfully appealed to Liberal Democrats in Westminster to work within cabinet committees, particularly on constitutional reform.
The creation of the Scottish parliament itself owes much to co-operation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, as they both sat on the constitutional convention which drew up the blueprint, and Labour gave way to the junior partner's demands for a proportional voting system.
But Liberal Democrat MSPs are deeply unhappy with the compromise on tuition fees, fearing they will be vulnerable to attacks from the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives, who also promised to scrap them.