In an age full of nepobaby second-generation politicians posing as ‘outsiders’, new Green Party MSP ‘Q Manivannan’ is the real thing. Indeed, the St Andrew’s postgraduate is so much of an outsider that he doesn’t even hold British citizenship or permanent residency, and is unable to take up paid employment as a condition of his student visa. ‘Q’ was allowed to stand for office last month because the Scottish government – the Wuhan Lab of terrible ideas in UK politics – recently changed the rules allowing foreigners with only limited leave to remain to compete in elections. Although Manivannan faced a probe into his visa, the powers-that-be ruled that being a politician wasn’t a real job. This prevented possibly the funniest outcome of all – the new member of the Scottish Parliament representing his constituents in Edinburgh and Lothians East remotely from Tamil Nadu.

A ‘transgender Tamil immigrant’, ‘Q’ – born Srivatsan Manivannan – identifies as non-binary and describes himself as ‘passionate about more caring politics rooted in the working class, the queer, and the solidary’. Currently engaged in a research project called ‘Archiving and (Re)imagining Caregiving as Peacebuilding in Third World Social Movements’, at the time of his election he was also crowdfunding £2,000 to pay for his visa, apparently too impoverished to pay for it himself.

The more I read about Manivannan, the more he comes to resemble a Sokal-like hoax designed to test the limits of what progressives will accept if it wins them social approval. Always smiling for the camera, Q seems to have a cheerful demeanour and hugely adds to gross national gaiety; he will make a fine footnote in the history of modern Britain, as some future Gibbon explains how the world’s foremost imperial power found itself giggling into the sea. He certainly has reason to be cheerful; the £77,000-a-year salary of an MSP compares favourably with the average Indian annual wage of £2,500, or indeed the typical earnings of a graduate in Britain doing a PhD in peace studies, which can’t be that much more.

Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but I find it hard to understand the mindset of someone who moves to a foreign country and, before even becoming a citizen, decides that they have the right to set its laws. Of course, as a billion Indians might say in response, you chaps do have some form on this matter........

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