A good night for John Swinney - but STV yet again do their weird "let's start the debate by telling voters how they're going to vote" thing

Apologies for not finishing my post last night, but I got back quite late from the Alba adoption meeting in Airdrie.  Before I fell asleep, I started watching the STV leaders' debate on catch-up - I'm interested to make my own mind up about John Swinney's performance, because there was a division on social media between a lot of 'ordinary' folk saying that he'd done really well, and sneering journalists saying that he'd flopped.  So far I'm agreeing more with the ordinary folk, who after all are the target audience anyway.  Swinney has his limitations, we all know that - he isn't a Salmond or a Sturgeon in terms of charisma, or a Kate Forbes for that matter, but within the scope of his abilities as a debater he seemed to be doing pretty well.  Remember that his opponents aren't exactly titans of debate either, and I've always thought that Sarwar in particular is bizarrely overrated.  (Paul Hutcheon of the Record declaring Sarwar the winner of the debate was the most predictable moment of the evening - he probably wrote his headline before the debate even took place.)

Alex Cole-Hamilton's "we're having a great election, just look at the smile on my face" will live long in the memory as the worst line delivered in any election debate, anywhere in the world, ever.

For years now, I've been pointing out STV's bizarre habit of starting election debates with lengthy references to the results of an opinion poll.  The whole purpose of a debate, surely, is to help voters decide how they want to vote, not to tell them how they're going to vote.  But on a day when there were two MRP polls published, one of which showed the SNP winning a majority and the other did not, it was particularly indefensible of STV to start the debate with lengthy references to one poll only, as if the other didn't exist or didn't matter.  For the life of me, I don't know why Swinney didn't fire back with the More in Common numbers when asked about the YouGov poll - he really missed a trick there.

Nigel Farage's announcement yesterday is one of those moments that we might look back on and realise that it didn't change anything and that we got over-excited about it, or it might be a really big moment in political history.  I'm leaning more towards the latter.  Suddenly Reform UK are ticking all the boxes - Farage is leader, he's standing as a candidate, and his party is standing in every seat, so there's nothing to stop the people of England electing him as Prime Minister if they want to.  They won't, of course, because there's a natural ceiling on Reform support which is probably somewhere in the mid-20s.  That was enough to put the party ahead (in their previous guise of the Brexit Party) in a handful of polls in the unusual circumstances of 2019, but it'll leave them well short in the current scenario of Labour polling in the 40s.  But if they hit their ceiling, it's going to cause carnage for the Conservative Party.  The idea that the Tories may not even be the official opposition after this election is no longer fanciful.

In Scotland the effect won't be so transformative because the Tories have so much less to lose here.  But because the SNP are the main rivals to the Tories pretty much anywhere the Tories are competitive, it could end up at least modestly boosting the SNP's seat tally, and you could see Douglas Ross was genuinely worried about that prospect last night.

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I've profiled the constituency of Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber for The National - you can read the piece HERE.