Luke Tryl

They say they did better at the general election than anyone thought they would in Scotland, and they did better in that by-election.

But I think that was maybe a demonstration of the battle that's possibly going on in the streets for voters between Labour and reform.

And I think that when he says over and over again, as Anas Sarwar does, my country, Scotland, I think that's also designed to appeal to potential supporters of independence.

And he's explicitly said, even if you support independence, I'm not really interested.

This election is not about that.

You can vote for me anyway.

I'm just thinking back to where we started and the leaders debate on BBC Scotland.

And my third takeaway from it, which I'm just reminding myself of now, is just how scrambled it all is when you look at that line of six men on the stage.

So you've got John Swinney, who's like one of the veterans, who's sort of becoming like the new guy again.

You've got Anna Sarwar, who's done one of the most epic things you can do in politics, which is to stab your leader of your party in the back.

And it sort of doesn't really even get mentioned anymore.

You've got the leader of Reform UK, who very recently was a Tory.

And actually, sometimes when you listen to him, he still sounds like an old-school Scottish Tory.

Then you've got the Greens being the insurgents, except until quite recently, they were actually in the government in Scotland.

And then you've got the Lib Dems just being quite consistently Lib Dem, even though we've not seen their manifesto yet.

So it's quite head-spinning, actually, because you can't quite pigeonhole everybody in a lazy way.

Yeah.

Let me try then.

Let me try and split them into a couple of camps.

And we talked about this a little bit on Newscast the other week.