Fears mount that Stew may face relentless "It's just a flesh wound" mockery as he refuses to give up on his "Reform will back an indyref" fairy-tale in defiance of overwhelming evidence: "OF COURSE I'm a more reliable authority on Reform policy than Richard Tice", Stew insists

It's been obvious for months that controversial Bath-based blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell intends to endorse a vote for the far-right anti-independence party Reform UK at next year's Holyrood election, and that he's currently engaged in the slow process of preparing the ground for that.  During my recent debate with him about tactical voting, I gave him a clear opportunity to rule out endorsing Reform, but he angrily refused to take it, which tells its own story.

However, this leaves him with a bit of a problem, because he's also trying to maintain an official fiction that he's at least nominally still a pro-independence blogger (in spite of making abundantly clear that he would abstain in any new independence referendum), and many of his disciples are still naive enough to take that claim at face value.  By endorsing Reform without some fiendishly clever cover story, he risks the scales finally falling from those people's eyes, which would mean the recent dramatic drop in his readership numbers reported by SimilarWeb may continue and intensify.  And Gawd bless him, he truly honestly thought he'd found the perfect cover story a few months ago, when the sports journalist Neil Drysdale tweeted an inaccurate story that Reform might back an independence referendum.  Stew's wishful thinking got the better of him, and he breathlessly reported what everyone else knew was a wildly implausible story as if it was the gospel truth.  He thought his fantasies had all come true, and that it would be possible to go Full-Fat Fascist while still posing as an independence supporter.

Reform predictably rubbished the story within hours, and for good measure humiliated Stew by openly mocking the Tories for treating him (briefly) as a credible source.  Now, most sensible bloggers at this stage would have just held their hands up and admitted they got it wrong, or at the very least maintained some dignified silence on the subject for a while.  But not our Stew.  He quickly returned to the fray all guns blazing, insisting that the person from Reform who had dismissed the story was not senior enough to be regarded as reliable, and that there was probably still a top secret plan at a higher level to back an indyref.  None of this, of course, makes the remotest logical sense, because Reform would not be daft enough to alienate their nationalist support base in England in pursuit of a much smaller number of pro-independence votes in Scotland.  But fair play to Stew, he's got his disciples just about brainwashed enough for them to accept that it was plausible that Stew might be a more reliable authority on Reform policy than Reform themselves.

It becomes a bit more problematical, though, when Reform's deputy leader Richard Tice makes clear, as he did yesterday, that the party would block an independence referendum if in power.  You might think that Stew would finally have to admit defeat at this point and accept that this is the definitive Reform position.  But that would be to severely underestimate the man's fortitude and optimism.

The idea that Tice determines policy is adorable, like if Angus Robertson made key decisions when he was Depute Leader of the SNP under Sturgeon 😄 https://t.co/SDWtGz6aOJ

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) May 19, 2025

You've got to love the laughing emoji at the end there, as Stew apparently expects his followers to laugh along with his mockery of the idea that the deputy leader of Reform UK might just possibly outrank Stew himself as an expert on Reform policy. Perhaps it's time for a kindly intervention like the one Terry Wogan performed on David Icke: "you do know they're laughing at you, not with you?" Otherwise Stew will just carry on and on and on without any self-awareness about how ridiculous he's making himself look, and let's face it, he's getting dangerously close to "It's just a flesh wound" territory.

And just to throw the kitchen sink at Stew, Reform's official Twitter account in Scotland tweeted this earlier -

Scotland doesn’t need independence.

Scotland needs Reform 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇬🇧

Be part of it ➡️ https://t.co/plgLBa1FdO pic.twitter.com/CN4jLczUrZ

— Reform UK Scotland (@ReformUKScot) May 18, 2025

Does that put the matter beyond all dispute? Oh don't be silly. STEWIE STILL KNOWS BEST. 

Come on, Stew, you're just being downright lazy here. You know you're going to have to do this Reform endorsement the hard way.  Better start honing your "to win independence, we must first kill independence" speech.  It'll be a hard sell, but we know you're the man for the job.