The Scottish Green party are often accused of promoting ‘student politics’ so it is perhaps no surprise they are fielding a 20-year-old social policy student, Cameron Eadie, in the forthcoming Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. What is a surprise is that they are standing at all. They’ve never stood here before. Indeed, Greens tend to avoid contesting constituency elections since they generally do rather badly, having only around 8 per cent of the popular vote in 2021.

What mischief is the ‘wee green man’, Patrick Harvie, and his band of stop oil disrupters up to now, wonder SNP insiders. Haven’t the Greens caused enough trouble recently? The SNP government is still picking up the pieces after the collapse of Green minister Lorna Slater’s disastrous recycling scheme. Humza Yousaf also had to step in to halt the Green-inspired Highly Protected Marine Areas policy after a revolt by Highland fishing communities.

The SNP membership has been increasingly frustrated at the ‘green tail wagging the SNP dog’. There is disquiet over the drive by the Low Carbon Housing Minister (to give the Green co-leader Patrick Harvie his proper title) to force 2 million Scottish homes to install costly heat pumps that even the suppliers say don’t work in Scotland’s climate. Worst of all is the insistence by the Greens that Humza Yousaf mount a doomed defence of the unpopular Gender Recognition Reform Bill and self-ID. The scandal of trans sex offenders in being placed in women’s prisons is still fresh in the public mind.

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