Thousands and thousands of Scots on Thursday voted Reform – and, as they reeled with the teal, Stephen Kerr of the Scottish Tories was fit to be tied.
‘The SNP are winning seat after seat despite losing a huge amount of votes,’ he raged.
‘Reform, by splitting the pro- UK vote, have ensured the SNP pick up constituencies across Scotland. Reform is the worst thing to happen to Unionism in the Scottish parliament.’
It’s a point of view, though rather neglecting the moral reality both that any political party has a right to contest elections, and that anyone has the right to vote for that party if they see fit without being insulted by the likes of Mr Kerr.
It’s scarcely the fault of Malcolm Offord or Nigel Farage that very many Scots have not yet forgotten the bin-fire, from the ‘Boris Wave’ to Liz Truss’s brief and calamitous economy-trashing outing as the Lady Jane Grey of Downing Street, that was the late Conservative rule.
Stephen Kerr, too, might take a less tunnel-visioned glance at the maths.
The one party whose vote plummeted almost everywhere – Shetland apart – was the SNP, and in every instance Reform had their hands in the blood, from Nationalist reverses in Edinburgh to disappointments in Galloway and the Borders and indeed the Western Isles.
Malcolm Offord was elected to the Scottish Parliament via the Regional List
It wasn’t the ferry fiasco that did for the SNP’s Alasdair Allan. It was Kate Forbes: as her Free Church faith was once and twice monstered, by Nationalist colleagues, the Greens and useful idiots in the press, the Western Isles MSP stayed schtum.
Don’t underestimate the impact of that in what is still a stronghold of Highland Presbyterianism.
Reform in Malcolm McTaggart put up an unabashedly Evangelical candidate, of a highly respected local family – coming in a strong third and with a lot of Free Church votes.
As I type, there are still some declarations outstanding and no regional-list seats yet announced; but Reform did not after all win a territorial seat (despite giving the Nats a serious fright in Banffshire and Buchan Coast) nor come second in the constituency vote.
They will not greatly mind. They are sending a goodly number of MSPs to Holyrood who may prove a grounded, refreshing voice in a parliament so intellectually debauched we have MSPs on all sides who cannot tell you what a woman is and call for the destruction of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East – the only state to stand for women’s rights and gay rights; the one nation where Arabs actually get to vote.
And Reform MSPs have been elected in no mean measure by a lot of folk who used to vote SNP.
It’s often forgotten that till 1984 the Nationalists were a fiercely Eurosceptic party. As late as the 1983 election a key pillar in their platform was to leave the Common Market.
Eight of the 11 seats they captured in 1974 had a significant fishing industry.
By the Nineties, of course, it was that ‘Independence in Europe’ schtick. Yet, by and large, the Eurohostile element in their habitual support stuck by them. Until belittled, derided, and spurned in the wake of Brexit – when, in the North-East and elsewhere, alienated and angry, many started voting Tory.
Nicola Sturgeon never ‘got’ small-town, rural, herring-port Scotland and Thursday’s evidence suggests John Swinney has not won much of it back.
John Swinney saw his party win the election - but they lost some key seats
The Nats ignored, at their peril, two figures I never tire of repeating: 1,018,322 Scots voted Leave in 2016 – more than the 977,569 who voted SNP in the subsequent, 2017 general election.
But the Nationalists are also a moral warning to Reform – in what can happen when a spectacular electoral insurgency sweeps inexperienced, ill-disciplined people unexpectedly into public office.
The first SNP surge after Winnie Ewing’s 1967 Hamilton triumph was swiftly undone by all the woeful SNP councillors returned, in her wake, at municipal polls the following year.
Let’s just say the numpty-count was pretty high, many scarcely bothering to attend the local chamber. And when the SNP surged anew in 1974, the ‘First Eleven’ soon became rather a Westminster joke.
A convivial, often unserious bunch for whom, as their rivals in the Commons noted, ‘every night was Hogmanay’.
In an atmosphere where many commentators screech as if Reform and its supporters are unconscionable and indeed illegitimate, there will be now many beady-eyes upon its MSPs.
Eyes without mercy, even as the internet archaeologists once more dig deep for past indiscretions and scandals – enough to have Malcolm Offord sit up screaming in bed.
Will they screw the nut? Speak plain truths; ask the tough questions? Or prove, alas, a ship of fools? Offord does, after all, boast of several boats.