Nigel Farage is a charlatan who is dragging British politics into the sewer and Malcolm Offord is his entitled Scottish stooge, says Herald columnist Kevin McKenna

Permit me your indulgence for a few moments before we get down to the real business of this column. You can’t, after all, make mere passing reference to Bud Neil. In Glasgow, when life imitates art it often happens gloriously in the subversive work of this gifted cartoonist whose comic strips appeared in the old Evening Times.

Mr Neil’s characters didn’t deliver boom-boom gags. Theirs was a wit and wisdom that came wrapped in a drawl issued from the sides of their mouths. Only after a few minutes were you aware that a lampooning was being enacted and the pleasure of discovering this was all the greater for it. Bud Neil’s most beloved creation was his Lobey Dosser strip, featuring the adventures of the eponymous wee Sheriff of Calton Creek.

The cast of characters included a two-legged horse called El Fideldo and his villainous nemesis Rank Bajin. His work stands alongside the genius of Charles M Schulz, creator of the great American comic strip, Peanuts. I mention Bud Neil because the unveiling of Malcolm Offord as the first Scottish leader of Reform UK last week resembled one of the artist’s most memorable stand-alone drawings. The cartoon featured a ‘Glasgow keelie’ making passing inquiry of a very elegantly dressed sailor who had alighted from a nearby yacht on the Clyde. “Yaffayat? Whityatyaffa?” Loosely translated, this means “Have you disembarked from a yacht? Assuming this to be the case, which particular yacht have you disembarked from?”

The statue of the Lobey Dosser on his horse El Fideldo with the the Rank Bajin in........

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