David Kirkwood tells the delegates gathered for Reform UK's Scottish Conference about Willie Sutton, the American bank robber.

The legend goes that when he was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is”.

“We need to go to where the votes are,” the party official tells the crowd squeezed into Perth’s Royal George Hotel’s ballroom.

The votes, he adds, are with Labour and the SNP. Winning over disenfranchised Tory voters is a doddle, but there is, he argues, fertile ground with voters disenfranchised with Anas Sarwar, Keir Starmer and John Swinney.

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If the schedule for the four-hour conference is anything to go by, the party thinks there are votes to be picked up from people worried about sex education in schools, angry about pylons in the countryside, concerned about drugs and fearful for the future of farming. 

They could be right. Polls suggest Reform is currently on nearly 11% of the vote in Scotland. Their UK-wide standing is currently 19%.

When I asked Professor Sir John Curtice what that could mean for the next election, he said it would translate to two seats in most regions and at least one in the others. Around 14 MSPs.

With no party, nor even any of the possible coalitions, likely to win a majority, this could give Reform an important role when the dust settles after the vote, but it could also lead to a very messy situation.

“Reform would not necessarily be the kingmakers — not least because nobody else would want to strike a deal with them — but given the standing of the other parties, if they have a significant presence forming a stable government could be difficult, again because no one wants to deal with them.”

This he said, could “require some understanding, of some kind at least across the unionist-nationalist divide.”

“Lots of water to flow under many bridges between now and May 2026,” he added.

There’s no doubt that polls and by-election results have given the activists and officials gathered in Perth a bit of a buzz.

“For those thinking that we'll replace the Tories, raise your ambition,” Mr Kirkwood told the faithful, many of them only recent converts.

There's also a bit of buzz following Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris. There are people here in MAGA hats. Some are wearing Make Britain Great Again shirts. 

In his keynote speech, Reform's deputy leader, Richard Tice, says the party will be looking to America for inspiration in 2026. 

“Why do you think Trump won such a successful election this time around?” he asks “People didn't have to agree with all his policies, but because he convinced them, even if they didn't like him as an individual, he convinced them that he would make them better off.

“Fundamentally, that's where we've got to be in the Holyrood elections, and then in the next general election.”

Key to those campaigns will be the party's call to end what he describes as the "madness" of net zero.

"Where are all these great green jobs that we were promised in Scotland?" he asks as he speaks to journalists away from the main hall. "There's a few hundred of them. There were hundreds of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industry.

"So we're going to have this big debate, and it's a more brutal debate, frankly, than Brexit.

"But we know we're right, and the truth is that the whole cost of living crisis, the whole of it, when you pair it all back, it all comes back to the madness of not having cheap, competitive energy because of net zero."

It's worth pointing out that an analysis from PWC published last week suggests there are closer to 29,000 green jobs in Scotland. 

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In July's general election, Reform won 167,979 votes north of the border, roughly 7%. 

What made this remarkable is they had next to no campaign. In fact, they barely had any candidates.

One of the most bizarre rumours that went around social media was that Reform’s candidate in Glasgow North was fictional.

Helen Burns had no online presence, didn’t appear in the constituency at any point and wasn’t at the count.

The Telegraph managed to track her down after the election. She was real, she just lived in the East Midlands.

“I do indeed exist,” she told the paper. “I am a real person,” she added.

The same can be said of Reform in Scotland. They exist. They are real. And, they could soon be in Holyrood.