At this point there is only one way to salvage Reform’s Scottish Parliament election campaign. Granted it’s unorthodox and, well, illegal, but hear me out: arrange to have Malcolm Offord kidnapped. Not long-term or anything, just until 7 May and the Holyrood elections in which Reform Scotland is set to make sizeable gains. Or at least it was until mid-January, when the party was hit by a leadership crisis, that crisis being Offord’s appointment to the leadership.

Offord has broken the cardinal rule of elections: don’t hand your opponents free ammunition

Offord has broken the cardinal rule of elections: don’t hand your opponents free ammunition

Without a leader, Reform was climbing up the polls. With Offord as leader, it’s going back down again. I might be in some very small way to blame for this. Around a year and a half ago, I wrote on Coffee House about a handful of Glasgow City Council by-elections in which a leaderless Reform went from nowhere to third place. At that time, the party was considered an English phenomenon by the Scottish political and media classes. I argued that Reform could do very well in the next Holyrood elections provided, and here’s where my mea culpa comes in, that it got itself a Scottish........

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