Malcolm ‘six homes’ Offord’s wealth puts him at odds with the deprived electorate he wishes to serve

Malcolm Offord must have a keyring the size of a school janny’s. How else to cart around keys for six houses, six boats and five cars?

The Reform UK leader in Scotland listed his assets during the STV leaders’ debate. “Do you want more people like me or fewer people like me?” he asked his Scottish Greens counterpart Ross Greer. “Fewer people like you,” Greer chipped back without a moment’s consideration.

“You don't need six homes, you don't even need two homes”, he went on.

Greer’s point was that “everyone just needs a home to live in”. And in the midst of a housing crisis and with worrying numbers of children growing up in temporary accommodation, that point’s certainly true.

But there are also other reasons to avoid such an excess of property. How do you keep track of it all? When there are so many places to put things down, how do you ever find anything? Do you need a drawer full of pants and socks in every house, or do you humph around a well-stocked suitcase full of basics?

Does Malcolm Offord own six separate soup pots? The mind boggles.

It certainly helps to explain why he was spotted driving an untaxed car a few days ago. “It's mortifying,” he commented after the story emerged in The Sun. “I've been constantly on the move for the campaign and missed the letter that I owed £200 of road tax on one of my cars on April 1st. Honestly, I'm grateful to the eagle-eyed journalists at The Sun for telling me – paid it as soon as I knew!”

See? A logistical nightmare.

He’s certainly done well for himself, however, having accumulated the wealth through graft in adulthood, rather than through inheritance.

That story is a key part of his political persona – the boy born in a Greenock tenement who went to London “£2,000 in debt” and made good.

It’s certainly an aspirational story – a classic ‘lad o’pairts’ tale.

But the success he has achieved is far from the norm, and the wealth he has accumulated is somewhat incongruous in the constituency he wishes to represent.

Yes, the new Inverclyde seat takes in the affluent villages of Inverkip and Kilmalcolm, but it also covers Port Glasgow, Greenock and Gourock, coastal towns in which industrial decline has made a real impact – so much in fact that one datazone, Greenock town centre and east central – is considered the most deprived part of the country in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

The index ranks communities on income, employment, health, housing and more. And the Inverclyde Council area has more communities in the 10 per cent most deprived category than any other part of Scotland.

So, there aren’t many households with six boats here.

Residents can look across the Clyde, but the idea of sailing across its waters remains out of reach for most.

But let's face it, that level of wealth is also outwith the scope of most the population, which most definitely includes the West Scotland region in which he is also standing.

With a week to go until the polls open, it’s hard to say whether Offord’s catalogue of assets will make residents feel more at home with the idea of making him their MSP.

But it’s worth noting that other panellists laughed as he spoke.

It seems they couldn’t believe their ears, and maybe their luck.

After all, Reform UK has positioned itself as an anti-establishment force coming in to challenge orthodoxy and create leaner, cheaper, more effective governance.

That’s a harder sell when you have multi-millionaires at the top of the party.