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

This week The Herald’s social media has been flooded with reactions to Count Binface declaring how he’d spend 24 hours as Scotland’s First Minister, but following the local and by-elections in England and Wales it’s another space cadet who continually fails to be elected to Westminster who has been making waves.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK came within 117 votes of the Conservatives at the Blackpool South by-election, pushed them into third in 16 council seats in Sunderland and got close to 80,000 votes in London’s mayoral election.

An already floundering Tory party will fear lost votes to the insurgent party could make a bad situation even worse – but is it something Scottish leader Douglas Ross has to be worried about?

Farage’s posse haven’t deigned to take an official position on Holyrood, but did mark the 25th anniversary of devolution by asking on social media whether it was time for a “rethink”.

Reform has already announced some candidates north of the border for the next Westminster election, with its website open to further applications, but it looks unlikely to cause anything like the stir it did in the English local elections.

Read more:

Unspun | Is there really going to be a hung parliament after the election?

The early knockings haven’t been positive for the party in Scotland. Two candidates, Stephen McNamara and David McNabb, were suspended by the party in April after some of their social media activity was exposed by The Ferret.

The latter described Humza Yousaf as “more Pakistani than Scottish”, as well as sharing a video by far-right commentator Katie Hopkins.

Mr McNamara was due to stand for the Kilmarnock & Loudon constituency but was suspended after it was discovered he had said trans people have “severe mental illness” and “their days are numbered”.

In a classic case of “you can’t dump me, I’m dumping you” he resigned from the party on the same day, though given he’s also been part of the Scottish Libertarian Party and a short-lived effort called Choice it’s perhaps fair to say he wasn’t that committed to the cause anyway. He remains active on social media and may stand as an independent – judging by his Twitter output probably for the Edgelord Cringe Party.

Toe-curling he may be, but the former candidate actually has more followers (5,548) on X/Twitter than Reform UK’s Scotland account (3,226) and the Libertarian Party totalled more votes than Reform at the last Holyrood election – as did Abolish The Scottish Parliament, Independent Green Voice (founded by a holocaust denier) and the Scottish Family Party.

Not that Mr Farage and co seem overly bothered by the Scottish vote. In the ‘Our Contract With You’ which passes for a manifesto on the party’s website, the word “Scotland” isn’t mentioned once. In the section dedicated to fishing and coastal communities, Aberdeen is described as a “fishing port” comparable to Grimsby or Hull. One can only assume they meant Peterhead, which handles around 150,000 tonnes of fish per year rather than the Granite City, which deals with 1,000 and is better known for the oil and gas industry.

The Herald: Reform UK campagin poster
It must be said, the appeal of Mr Farage and his ilk has always been more selective north of the border. His former party, UKIP, managed just 2% of the vote nationwide in the 2016 Holyrood election and when its Scottish leader stood in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in the general election the following year he managed a grand total of 540 votes.

With a general election expected this year, all the polling points to a straight shoot-out between the SNP and Scottish Labour in the majority of seats, and it’s hard to see supporters of either party lending their vote to Reform.

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Perhaps for Douglas Ross there may be some concern about the party’s potential impact in target seats. Reform is standing in Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock where just a 2.5% swing from 2019 would be needed to return the seat to the Tories, and could yet announce candidates for other marginal seats like Angus or Gordon.

Given the situation the Conservatives find themselves in nationally, and poll numbers in Scotland which have them on something between 15% and 18%, any notion of gaining seats is likely fanciful. Mr Ross himself held off the SNP by just 513 votes in 2019 in his Moray constituency, with UKIP candidate Rob Scorer receiving 413, but given the numbers involved it’s hard to see Reform having much of an impact either way this time around.

Count Binface though? Now he might have a shot.