Chippy Richard Tetchy goes to the chippy

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage mini-me, the notoriously bad tempered Richard Tetchy, sorry, Tice, was in Scotland this week in order to pretend that he and Farage’s private limited company masquerading as a democratically constituted far right English nationalist party actually care about Scotland. Spoiler alert, he failed miserably.

It has been clear for some time that – as befits a nakedly English nationalist party – Reform UK has little interest in Scotland and has not bothered itself with developing a suite of Scottish specific policies. As previously pointed out in this blog, the party’s showing in opinion polling in Scotland is almost entirely due to the constant platforming the party receives in the British media. More of that platforming will take place on BBC1 on Thursday evening when Tetchy will appear as a guest on BBC Question Time from Skipton in North Yorkshire.

Reform is doing significantly worse in opinion polling in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. Its standing will not have been helped by Tetchy’s performance before the massed ranks of the Scottish media when he fully lived up to his name and allowed everyone to experience his ignorant and arrogant entitled authoritarian middle class rich boy twattery.

It started off badly with a car crash interview on BBC Radio Scotland with Gary Robertson during which Robertson asked some perfectly reasonable questions to which any politician with a modicum of sense could have seen coming even from the distance of England’s Home Counties and had some glib pre-prepared responses to.

But Tetchy despises anyone with the temerity not to take him at his own bloated estimation of himself and fails dismally when asked any question which doesn’t go along the lines of – Richard, please tell us how brilliant you are.

Robertson asked Tetchy about John Swinney’s view that Nigel Farage is “fundamentally racist”. This comment was widely reported a few weeks ago and Tetchy should have seen it coming, but then Tetchy is as likely to pay attention to the Scottish press as he does to scholarly journals containing articles about the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Tetchy ranted ranted in response: “Are you accusing, are you accusing the, the Scottish voters who are not willing to vote for the SNP or Labour, are you accusing them all being racist? Don’t be daft. Don’t be juvenile.”

That was a very Ein Reich Ein Volk Ein Führer response from Tetchy. If the Dear Leader is “fundamentally racist” then so is everyone not willing to vote SNP or Labour, surely he didn’t mean those who vote for the Scottish Greens. But his response was not merely asinine in its manufactured outrage, it also displayed complete ignorance of the realities of Scottish politics.

There was only one person being juvenile here and that was Tetchy. Seeing he was getting nowhere with the pompous balloon, Robertson then pivoted to try and ask why Scottish voters should support the party “when it seems that Scotland is so down [Reform’s] list of priorities.” Reform’s Scottish policies could be written on the back of one of Nigel Farage’s fag packets, and that would still leave room for a diatribe about asylum seekers.

Naturally Robertson was rewarded with another angry rant in which Tetchy completely failed to address the point put to him and so inadvertently proved Robertson’s point. Speaking on top of Robertson, Tetchy railed: “If you’re going to ask me a question, have the courtesy of letting me answer, otherwise there’s no point doing anything.”

He continued: “You can’t keep spending more money than you’re earning, and the Scottish economy, like the rest of the UK is heading towards bankruptcy unless we change course, and it’s about time people had some realism, some honest hard truths.”

What was missing from this thinly disguised paean to Elon Musk’s public services and public sector jobs destroying DOGE – which is currently going down in the USA like a bucket of vomit – was any attempt to answer the question which had been put to him. Reform UK’s Scottish policies remain as mythical as Richard Tetchy’s political competence.

Tetchy did find time to respond to a question about whether Reform UK would support another Scottish independence referendum with: “We’re a Unionist party.” When a party is attracting defectors who are leaving the Tories because it’s not hard right and Anglo-British nationalist enough, you might think its attitude to another independence referendum was a given. Some within Reform, such as Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, make no secret of their desire to abolish the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and reduce Scotland and Wales to the same status as the English regions. Voting for Reform UK in the hopes of another independence referendum is like voting for Starmer for political honesty.

This train wreck of an interview was the successful part of Tetchy’s visit to Scotland. It was followed by a press conference at a chip shop in the East End of Glasgow, the Val d’Oro in London Road – so you can avoid it in future. The press conference was held at a chippy because no one is more chippy than Richard Tetchy and it’s the sort of working class thing that millionaire English public schoolboys think gives them street creds.

The purpose of the press conference was for Tetchy to introduce two Tory councillors who have just defected to his party on the grounds that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories aren’t swivel eyed enough. Unfortunately Tetchy had paid such little attention that he had no idea what their names were or what local authorities they represented. That’s the political equivalent of, “I do so have a girlfriend, but she goes to a different school.”

Tetchy disappeared back into the chippy and eventually appeared with a pair of randos he introduced to the press as Ross and John.

He was then asked – quite reasonably under the circumstances – what their surnames were but this only got him more annoyed, everyone knows that all Scots are called Jock McJocko. He snapped: “Are you going to challenge me on everything or are you going to ask me a politics question? I’m answering policy questions.”

Knowing the names of your elected representatives is a pretty basic politics question, especially when the entire point of your press conference was to tell the media that these two councillors have just defected to your party. But the only person in Reform UK whose name anyone needs to know is Nigel Farage, everyone else, Tetchy included, is just padding.

The two Tory councillors who have defected to Reform UK are Renfrewshire councillor John Gray and South Lanarkshire councillor Ross Lambie. To be fair they are indeed eminently forgettable. Reform claims that it’s going to be a force in Scottish politics but at the same time its leadership is so lazily arrogant and ignorant of Scottish politics that not only can they not be bothered to develop a package of Scottish policies but their deputy leader Richard Tetchy can’t even find out the names of the councillors whose defection to Reform UK he was in Glasgow to announce. You couldn’t ask for a starker example of being taken for granted.

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