Just as there is (apparently) more than one way to skin a cat, the last week has shown there is more than one way to run an election campaign.

Convention tends towards the cautious and – small c – conservative method that we see practiced by Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.

They make speeches to bleary-eyed activists and visit bewildered businesses.

They play (or try to play) football with kids and pose behind the counters of cafes or wandering around building sites.

Occasionally, they are even put in front of actual voters, the leaders’ faces contorted with the fear of either being shouted at or inadvertently calling someone a bigot.

There is, of course, an alternative to this straightforward form of campaigning and it can often be extremely effective.

Boris Johnson drove a digger through a brick wall, Jim Murphy traversed Scotland standing on an Irn-Bru crate and much-missed Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie made a major policy announcement in front of a pair of fornicating pigs.

All of these methods, unlike the more cautious ones, live long in the memory.

But the SNP has, extraordinarily, found an even more novel way to campaign.

It began........

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