With Malcolm “Coco” Offord driving, this was the week that the wheels fell off Reform’s Scottish clown car.

And what a dismal week it was. Clown Show Act 1 was the unveiling of their assembled Holyrood election hopefuls. The only thing missing was face paints and wigs.

Within hours their candidate for Dundee West was suspended after it was revealed he’d been disqualified as a company director for diverting thousands of pounds of taxpayer money in Covid loans to his personal bank account.

Just the type of stand-up guy you want as an MSP deciding the nation’s finances, eh? They’ll be inviting Michelle Mone to stand for them next.

About the same time, three further candidates were exposed for extremist opinions.

Their candidate for Galloway had called for Muslims to be deported – presumably that includes prominent Reform bigwig Zia Yusuf who is the Muslim son of Sri Lankan immigrants.

The Stirling candidate from Auchterarder spread inflammatory rumours about asylum seekers moving into a former school in Perthshire.

Their Fife candidate had called former First Minister Humza Yousaf a “grandstanding Islamist moron” who is “not British”. Again, do they think the same goes for Zia Yusuf?

It gets worse. Fifteen of their MSP-wannabes were exposed as members of the “Reform – Team Scotland” Facebook group, which spreads racist conspiracy theories and brands Muslims a “cancer” and “invaders”.

This is warped and dangerous racism, pure and simple. It maligns the nurses, doctors, dentists, brickies, joiners, plumbers, care home workers, shop owners, taxi drivers, accountants, lawyers, policemen who are the fabric of our communities.

Unfortunately, this outcome was entirely unsurprising. With Reform’s leadership regularly voicing racist rhetoric, it doesn’t take Mystic Meg to predict you’ll attract like-minded people. This is who Reform are.

Clown Show Act 2 was the manifesto platform on which Reform’s cast of cranks and crackpots are standing. That’s when the doors fell off and the engine dropped out of the clown car’s bonnet.

The flagship policy announced by Offord and chancer-in-chief Farage was on income tax.

They want to scrap Scottish tax bands that differ from the UK and, over time, cut all rates by 1%, then 2%, then 3% below the UK level.

Sounds promising – everyone likes a tax cut, don’t they? Except, if you earn around £31,000, you just might be able to afford an extra grande latte once a week.

Unsurprisingly for a party run by millionaires for millionaires, the big winners would be big earners. Someone on £125,000 would get an effective take home pay rise of a whopping £9000 a year. Whodathunkit?

Offord blustered that these changes would pay for themselves and not require public service cuts – much the same as Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng promised with their 2022 budget of £45billion in unfunded tax cuts.

Like Truss and KamiKwasi, Farage and Offord are not to be trusted. Don’t believe me? Then believe the politically independent Institute of Fiscal Studies.

The IFS said Reform’s financial projections were “unserious at best”, adding: “The ‘self-funding’ tax cuts are therefore a mirage created by a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the current devolution settlement and incorrectly comparing cumulative and annual figures. This is not good enough.”

Clown Show Act 3 was perhaps the most shocking because it was not so widely anticipated.

It turns out Malcoco Offord himself has seriously impaired judgment after he made a truly horrendous homophobic joke about dead pop star George Michael.

The joke was too unsavoury for even the boisterous rugby club crowd who heard it from Offord’s lips, let alone being fit to repeat here.

This is the same Reform ringmaster who bragged that his party had a robust candidate vetting process.

Given the shower who made it as candidates, it begs the question: who oversaw vetting? The three monkeys See, Hear and Speak no evil? Tommy Robinson?

I’ve never met Offord to gauge his true character, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t harbour abhorrent opinions on race and religion.

But his tasteless joke alone marks him as unsuitable to hold public office. For any other party leader, this would end in resignation.

And to think at one point last week – when he was sent out to answer for his offensive fellow candidates – I almost felt sorry for him. Until he opened his mouth.

Then I remembered Offord is an entitled, multi-millionaire, political opportunist who deserted the sinking Tory ship because he had his eye on the main chance with Reform.

Instead of promising a purge, Offord excused his candidates, saying they wouldn’t be stopped from standing for Reform because they previously said “something fruity”.

A cynic might wonder if he carefully selected “fruity” with his own utterances in mind.

Reform might think corrosive racism or disgraceful homophobic jokes are fruity – but no-one else is laughing.

© The Courier