If Anas Sarwar and John Swinney had accompanied me on my travels around Scotland’s central belt last week they might have gained some insight into why their parties are threatened by Reform UK. This was a week when we learned that the First Minister has overseen the covert construction of a spin machine costing £1.7m a year.

The principal task of this dismal Matalan army is to prevent Mr Swinney from getting too close to the communities I meet most weeks and thus hearing their concerns. Their secondary function is to stop assorted government ministers making fools of themselves, a task that increases in magnitude each year as the average IQ of the SNP’s first team reduces.

Mr Swinney seems a bright chap, but even he seems to have been dulled by daily proximity to his cabinet. Responding to the SNP’s loss of the seat, he’d wisely declared that supporters of Reform UK in Scotland were not racist. It’s just that ordinary people had opted for them out of their concerns about Brexit, he claimed. If this is the quality of the advice he’s getting from his battalion of spin merchants then he needs to start culling them now.

The loathing that his party and some prominent independence activists have for working class communities was also on display in the immediate aftermath of the by-election. What intensified their fury was that their votes were more or less evenly split between a Labour candidate whom they associated with Scotland’s white Protestant working class and a Reform candidate who also appealed to this community. In diverse, progressive and enlightened Scotland there can be many cultures but some are less equal than others.

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Reform UK is now a serious political force in Scotland but Scottish Tories in trouble........

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