One of literature’s most famous opening lines comes in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Until recently, you could mangle Tolstoy’s aphorism into a fairly succinct commentary on the state of Scottish politics: all of Scotland’s political parties are rotten - but each is rotten in its own way. 

This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

However, that no longer stands. With Reform now in Holyrood, the notion of collective rottenness has changed. 

You can still bundle the other parties together as a bunch of fairly abysmal chancers and mountebanks of varying degrees across a spectrum of failure and idiocy, but Reform is in a league of its own. 

Reform isn’t just rotten. Reform stinks. And the smell is pervading the Scottish Parliament.

Now that politics has calmed somewhat after the recent elections and the carnival surrounding Peter Murrell, Holyrood is returning to the familiar grind of parliamentary business.

This session is markedly different to previous periods, though. It’s uglier, nastier, and that is down to Reform.

This week was made particularly fractious due to Faragists. Evidently, in the age of culture war, Holyrood has seen more than its fair share of unpleasant politics, but matters seem to have revved up somewhat now Malcolm Offord and Co. are ensconced in the chamber.

In a very troubling moment, the Reform MSP Thomas Kerr was accused of laughing about the anti-Muslim attack in Edinburgh which left five people injured.

Andy Burnham could create a nightmare........

© Herald Scotland