Kevin McKenna

As soon as we’d entered the community garden I spotted the gnome lurking in the shrubbery, affecting innocence. And if I’d spotted it, then surely Anas Sarwar had too. The two photographers certainly had. They were crouching down at my right as Labour’s Scottish leader rattled off his well-thumbed New Deal for Working People, the primer for every candidate in this election and which every one of them must, by now, be reciting in their sleep.

Host Mishal Husein quickly set the scene for last night’s BBC leaders’ debate. “One by one the questioners will stand up,” she told us before the event. “We want to cover as many topics as possible”. Haud me back. It’s time for some jeopardy to be injected into this tired format.

When financial scandals involving the Conservative Party occur, one facet of them always surprises me: that people still retain the capacity to be shocked and outraged. In the last four years, we’ve had three: all of them emblematic of a credo and mindset which truly define what it means to be a Tory.

In Campsie cemetery where the hills descend gently to embrace the dead, we gathered last week to bid farewell to Garth Heffernan. As he was being laid to rest, 4700 miles away in Sierra Leone plans were being drawn up for a school that will bear his name. You probably won’t have heard of Garth Heffernan and here I must declare an interest. He was the father of one of my best friends and probably the first adult to engage with me in a grown-up manner about the intricate contradictions of life behind the old Iron Curtain.

If Scotland make history and qualify for the knock-out stage of the Euros will it boost the SNP’s flagging fortunes?

It all sounds like good old fashioned, no-nonsense Socialism of the type that her grandfather once championed. It might even catch on at Westminster. Is the Jimmy Reid connection a help or a hindrance?

The big Scottish issue in last night’s Leaders’ Question Time didn't get asked.

After 17 years in government its main proponents, the SNP has lately become associated with failure across every sector in which it wields devolved power. Nevertheless, while the Conservatives were in government at Westminster and under the jurisdiction of pantomime villains such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, independence could easily be marketed.

Unfortunately, I felt moved to tell this sclerotic chap that if it wasn’t for Labour he wouldn’t be living in a house like this in the first place.

In an election campaign of personal ‘firsts’ may I crave your indulgence for just one more? Three weeks ago, I was being driven to my first cattle market by the leader of the Scottish Tories. It seemed then that no other encounter could be quite so esoteric. “Hold my beer,” say the Grangemouth ‘Loo Crew’, a group of determined women who forced their local Council into a U-turn on the u-bends. And so, here is my first-ever review of a public convenience.