Nigel Farage has a track record of noisy, messy campaign visits to Scotland.
After being famously hounded out of an Edinburgh pub in 2013, on Monday came the Aberdeen media conference in a fish restaurant to the soundtrack of “Farage is a racist” chants outside from the small, but vocal crowd.
“We’ve not had this (protests) for a long time,” Mr Farage tells me while the cameras are setting up for our Sky News interview.
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Mr Farage came to northeast Scotland with a spring in his step as Reform UK surges in the Scottish polls. One even suggests his party could become the official opposition to the SNP in Holyrood in 2026. A humiliating prospect for Labour and the Conservatives.
The Reform leader has notably pivoted his attacks on the “Scottish establishment” in recent weeks ahead of a by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse this Thursday.
SNP chief John Swinney is churning out almost daily press releases about Mr Farage claiming he “doesn’t care about Scotland”. Meanwhile Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar branded the Reform boss a “pathetic little man”.
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This week’s by-election will be a barometer of where Reform support potentially sits more nationally. The SNP and Labour are privately nervous.
But Scotland, it seems, is not riding the same “Farage tsunami” as England.
He alleges he is capitalising on the disenfranchisement in Scottish politics at the moment, yet the polls suggest the SNP could still storm to power again next year and enter their third decade in power.
Mr Sarwar and Mr Farage have been at loggerheads in a bitter war of words over an old speech the Scottish Labour leader gave, where he talked about minority communities. There is no doubt that Reform has taken that footage out of context as part of a political game.
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Mr Farage is playing down Reform’s chances, saying his party is a “teenager that hasn’t reached maturity yet”. Is that code for dodging scrutiny on policy detail?
Sir Keir Starmer would be humiliated by defeat from a “teenager” this week in Scotland.
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It would have been inconceivable Mr Farage would have been taking up so much political bandwidth even a year ago in Scotland, given the country notoriously rejected his politics for more than a decade.
It is a remarkable charge in narrative, but Reform is yet to win any major seat north of the border.
