The people of Aberdeen South go to the polls on Thursday and what a curious competition it has proved to be. The SNP candidate Richard Thomson has said some weird stuff about the North Sea and Ruth Davidson has been in town saying some interesting stuff about how the vote might go. I can see the past in it, I think, but I can also, I hope, see the future.

Let’s deal with Mr Thomson’s remarks first shall we. You probably know that oil and gas has been the number one issue in the by-election and no one who knows anything about Aberdeen is surprised by that. The city grew rich on oil in the 70s when unemployment among Aberdonians was less than half the Scottish average, house prices were higher than anywhere outside the south-east of England and the airport was Britain’s busiest outside London. I grew up not far from Shell’s humungous head office on the hill above the city and to me, the great angular, brutalist, modernist building looked like something from the future. What is it now? Rubble.

So if I was Mr Thomson of the SNP and I was trying to win a seat in Aberdeen, I would be very careful indeed about what I say about oil and gas, but instead he said this: “Scotland’s energy resources should be used to enrich the Scottish people – that is something the Tories and Reform never want to see happen, they want to keep syphoning off billions from our North Sea and send us nothing back in return.” He also said this: “Nigel Farage has his eyes fixed on Aberdeen South’s energy wealth and we cannot let him get his hands on it.”

This is curious stuff from Mr Thomson, who will know what the oil boom did to his party. It was Margo MacDonald who said that the discovery of oil put an end to the idea of........

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