ON SATURDAY past, at a Reform UK Scotland rally in Falkirk, something happened that strengthened Reform’s prospects for the Holyrood election in May.
Malcolm Offord (The Lord Offord of Garvel CVO) resigned from the Conservative Party, including his posts as Shadow Energy spokesman and Treasurer for the Scottish Conservatives, and joined Reform UK. He also announced his intention to relinquish his peerage to run in next year’s Scottish Parliament election.
The news was a shock – remarkably there had been no leak or rumour despite Offord having made his frustration with the Scottish Tory approach plain for months within the party. That no one in the Tory hierarchy took any notice of Offord’s dissatisfaction, which he indicated in a long paper he edited for the Centre for Policy Studies, “Wealthy Nation, Healthy Nation”, is a telling sign of how out of touch the party is, not just with its own members, but with the changing political landscape beyond Holyrood.
Offord argued the centre-right in Scotland has to offer something better than constant constitutional trench-warfare. People want a positive vision of “a prosperous, proud, healthy and happy country” with a functioning economy and public services that work again:
“A country where work is respected and rewarded. A country where our young people are skilled up for the modern economy and clustered around our natural areas of economic excellence. It’s a vision of a country that believes in the value of our own home-grown talent, where working-age adults are encouraged, retrained and incentivised to return to work”.
Instead, he said, the Scottish Conservatives had settled for shadow-boxing with the SNP, hoping that simply not being them will be enough. Voters can see the constitutional stalemate for what it is: nothing has moved since 2014, and the issues they care about continue to get worse.
As he put it, the party he left behind has become “regional not national, parochial not political, timid not ambitious; a party without a vision of how to govern Scotland with a right-of-centre agenda.”
Why Reform UK then? Offord sees it as the only party that has stayed true to a centre-right programme on tax, immigration, the size of the state and Net Zero, and one that has the whole-hearted drive to make a fight of it. In his view, Reform offers optimism rather than managed decline. On that basis, the match between Offord and Reform makes complete sense.
Why is he such a game-changer for Reform in Scotland?
Until now, the party here has lacked an obvious big beast among its recruits. Conscientious as they are, former Tory MSP Graham Simpson and the 20 councillors who have defected over recent months (16 ex-Conservatives, 3 ex-Labour and one ex-SNP) would eventually require leadership. As Nigel Farage had recently pointed out, he would not be doing the TV hustings.
Reform has know-how of politics at Holyrood and council levels covered; now Offord brings invaluable ministerial experience of the Scotland Office and knowledge of the Holyrood-Westminster relationship. Offord, while not (yet) a household name, offers the prospect of being that big beast.
Three things stand out.
First, he brings intellectual heft and seriousness to the party in a similar way Danny Kruger has in London. He credits conversations with Kruger, the front bench Tory MP who defected to Reform in September, as having helped push him towards Reform. Offord first came to significant notice for his intellectual contribution when he published a series of essays entitled “The United Kingdom: Why Scotland Should Remain” during the 2021 Holyrood election campaign.
Like Kruger’s presence in Reform, Offord’s presence signifies the party is not – as critics like to characterise it – a light-weight populist outfit full of opportunists. In Scotland, he will super-charge the building of ambitious and distinctively Scottish policies for the Holyrood election.
Second, he has a very successful business background, as a financier working in private equity for over thirty years – having first worked in the City and then set up his own Edinburgh-based private equity company, Badenoch and Co. This is in stark contrast to the vast majority of politicians whose pre-politics backgrounds – if they have any – are in the public or the third sectors. Consequently, Offord knows in his bones that successful businesses are the foundation for a successful economy and society, and he knows the conditions government must create as a priority to ensure that success.
Third, Offord’s experience in the Scotland Office as Under-Secretary of State reporting to Alister Jack was formative. He visited Scotland’s 32 local authorities as part of the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda which distributed nearly £3billion. He says the councils were delighted by this engagement because they received no such attention from the Scottish Government. It gave him a front row seat on the neglect and decline which has afflicted Scottish communities since devolution: it also highlighted the potential for further devolution from Holyrood to town halls.
In terms of specific policy approaches beyond economic focus, Offord brings two which have particular resonance for Reform’s positioning in Scotland. The first is his highly critical take on Net Zero and the way it is wrecking Scotland’s industrial base – Kemi Badenoch made him her Shadow Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero in September 2024 and he was shocked at what he found the UK’s approach was delivering. His take on Net Zero will find sympathy with many Labour voters seeing their industrial jobs melt away.
The second is his work for the No campaign for the 2014 Independence referendum. With Offord in a prominent role, it will be much harder for ultra-unionists to charge Reform with being soft on nationalism.
Ironically, after Offord made his transition speech in Falkirk, several ex-nationalists commented to me that he sounded like a nationalist in his enthusiasm for Scotland. They said it reminded them of the early days of the SNP under Salmond. The reason for this is that Offord exudes genuine optimism and belief in Scotland after decades of decline, dreary managerialism and failing delivery.
The SNP reflex to reach for grievance in its incessant campaigning for independence only underlines what Scotland can’t do. By contrast, Offord brings a powerful can-do voice which has never been more needed.
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Photo of Malcolm Offord speaking at Inchyra Hotel, Grangemouth, from the Reform UK YouTube live feed.
