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THE inaugural First Minister’s Questions of the new parliamentary session confirmed one thing: Reform UK’s Scottish wing is a mess.
Malcolm Offord, the leader of the newly minted group (they never previously had more than a single Tory defector at a time), managed to get even the most basic of the basics wrong.
In one example, speaking about the Scottish Parliament’s calls for the powers over a second referendum, Offord said: “The debate was on Tuesday. It was rejected on Wednesday. This is Thursday.”
The UK Government had in fact issued its rejection on Tuesday, not Wednesday.
In another, Offord asked the First Minister to give “unequivocal support” to opening new North Sea oil and gas fields and “actually step forward on the fact that the licensing and planning is in the control of the Scottish Government”.
Despite Offord's liberal use of the word "fact", power over oil and gas licensing is reserved to Westminster.
The Reform MSP also decided to use some of his time bizarrely explaining pledges his opponents had upheld – but perhaps his biggest mistake was asking about energy policy at all.
John Swinney’s more experienced opponents took the chance to push the First Minister on the issue of the day, Peter Murrell – whereas Offord’s questions were bog-standard, rehearsed repetitions of the same lines he had been parroting for months (See: “Even the Norwegian energy minister thinks that is daft”).
It meant the First Minister was able to give the same rehearsed repetitions in response, getting no one anywhere.
Before the election, Offord said he could be ousted as Reform’s Holyrood leader by the MSP group. Any more performances like that, and they may well be looking to do so.
Elsewhere at the first FMQs, things were largely as they had been before the 2026 elections.
The Greens pushed for left-wing policy commitments from the SNP, and got a piecemeal “We’ll consider it” in response.
The LibDems sensibly enough asked about the ferries, and got a sensible enough answer in return.
Scottish Labour’s rhetoric about achieving “greater cooperation” and trading “in bigger ideas” completed its evaporation, leaving behind a sneering Anas Sarwar who has by now perfected the grimace he puts on every time the First Minister speaks.
And the Scottish Tories remain stuck in a timeloop, where Russell Findlay wakes up every morning and Nicola Sturgeon is still the first minister.
“The Lord Advocate MUST explain why Nicola Sturgeon was not prosecuted,” the Conservative MSP wrote on Twitter after FMQs, sharing a video of himself speaking.
That sums up his entire contribution, which had nothing to do with getting a straight answer and everything to do with a social media clip.
If the Scottish Tories had truly been interested in the answer to their question, they would have listened on Tuesday, the first time they asked it.
Then, Swinney called the aspersions the Tories were casting on Scotland’s independent prosecutors an “insult to the rule of law [that] should not be tolerated”.
The First Minister is right. If, say, Green leader Zack Polanski was attacking the UK Crown Office with the same words, the Conservatives would be queuing up to condemn him.
But Findlay’s Tories can do it in Scotland because they are trying to paint an image of a failed state with corrupted institutions that could not survive independence.
There is little doubt they will continue, and little hope this first FMQs doesn’t reflect how the new parliament means to go on.
Sadly, it almost certainly did.
