A few days into the Holyrood election campaign, here is the real winner

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I’m sure you’ll have heard worse at rugby club dinners, John, said a friend after details of Malcolm Offord’s attempt at humour at a London Scottish Burns night eight years ago emerged.

Well actually, no. It wasn’t just homophobic and racist, it was put-you-off-your-haggis horrible. As I’m now chair of the Watsonian Football club, I’ve been to my fair share of rugby events in the last couple of seasons and heard plenty of ribald speakers, but none of them cracked gags approaching the level of tastelessness Reform Scotland’s leader achieved.

In fairness, he appeared to understand he had stepped well over the mark by apologising immediately after and making a donation to a gay rugby club in penitence, and the renewed shame seemed pretty clear from the number of cancelled appointments as the election campaign got up to speed this week. He sent a deputy to an Institute of Directors hustings in Edinburgh on Thursday night, ordinarily the kind of audience the millionaire financier would have enjoyed addressing, opting instead for the relative safety of a campaign event on home territory in Greenock.

He’s not the first successful businessman to find the politics lark a lot more difficult than it appears, and he won’t be the last, but excruciating though it obviously is for him just now, polling experts like Mark Diffley are certain it won’t make much difference to the kind of people likely to vote Reform, if they are aware of it at all, either excusing it because change has got to come anyway, dismissing it as just banter from years ago, or blaming another establishment conspiracy.

But chaos there has been, with a remarkable candidate drop-out rate only a week since the list of Reform hopefuls was announced, with Offord managing to blame a media conspiracy – what we in the press tend to describe as doing your job − before going to ground himself. I don’t believe for a second Reform thought their candidates’ pasts wouldn’t be scrutinised, but the withdrawal of North East Fife candidate Linda Holt because of what she said was “lack of support from the party” can’t be pinned on anyone else.

Nor can they blame the media for their manifesto, but gave it a good go by attacking the Institute for Fiscal Studies as the “establishment” for its dismissal of Reform’s tax-cutting agenda to reduce government spending by £3.7 billion and increase tax revenues through economic growth as “not credible.”

Reform UK leader in Scotland Malcolm Offord | PA

It may be true that the left-leaning IFS is generally sceptical of a low-tax approach, and the Conservatives have also proposed an aggressive income tax reduction programme to bring Scotland back into line with England, but no party is likely to follow Reform’s madcap plan for a new property tax to replace business rates and the SNP’s exorbitant Land and Buildings Transaction Tax.

Billed as “revenue neutral,” to bring in as much as those it replaces would mean every household receiving an annual bill of around £1600 on top of council tax and water and sewerage rates, an extraordinary plan to snatch back much of what it plans to hand out in reduced income tax.

But the question again is whether voters currently saying they back Reform will notice, less likely if the other parties don’t shout about it, and this is the conundrum facing the Conservatives − while they are fighting the SNP at the front door, Reform has gone round the back and stolen the family silver. From the Conservative perspective the election already feels like it’s a repeat of 2016 or 2021, with the central “Stop the SNP and Indyref2” theme designed to shore up support in target Borders and North-East strongholds, assisted by the SNP pedalling the same old “the only way forward is independence” schtick aimed at core voters.

Not being in leader Russell Findlay’s campaign team, I can only presume they are seeing research results which indicates banging on about Indyref 2 is the best way to differentiate the party from the Lib Dems, particularly after their deal to pass the SNP budget. But the returns are likely to be scant because it does little to inspire people to vote Tory when there is a wider menu of Unionist parties than before, and I doubt very much that voters will buy the “Reform are soft on independence” stuff. And I suspect most voters who listen to political messaging don’t believe SNP is serious about a referendum and think Labour won’t grant one anyway.

As for Labour, polling guru Sir John Curtice dismisses their campaign as “Vote for us because that lot are useless” which pretty much sums it up. Remaining ever more bound to energy policies which will destroy North Sea oil and gas at a time of a global fuel crisis is not a platform for success, while left-leaning idealistic young voters are seduced by the Green Party’s demands for Nirvana, as realistic as the late Kurt Cobain recording a new song.

If the story of the week has been Reform in meltdown, the story of election night could well be the Greens’ success, the beneficiaries of alienation, particularly amongst university-educated young people sensitive to climate change scaremongering and attracted by anti-British identity politics, facing a shrinking jobs market and a shortage of affordable places to live.

Only a few days into the six-week run-in my early prediction is SNP way out in front, natch, Labour squeezing into second ahead of the Greens, Reform running out of steam but still ahead of the Conservatives, and the Lib Dems somewhere in the bronze medal guddle with enough seats for a confidence and supply arrangement with the SNP. And the real winner? Apathy.