Intoxicated by a heady breath of fresh air

Mr Buchanan is a Tory and so, obviously, he didn't get voted in, but is the replacement list MSP for the late and much-lamented David McLetchie.

David stood for everything I disliked, and yet I liked him personally, a phenomenon that Tories often induce in the unwary. I think it happens more in Scotland, where Conservatives are relaxed and charming because they don't have the stress of contemplating power and responsibility. They're chilled. Whereas Dave Cameron and fellow Tories in England never look more stressed than when trying to chill.

Odd that. But these are odd times. And Mr Buchanan, bless him, did an odd thing, even before he'd sat down and taken the weight off his pumps. He spoke of his respect for the First Eck, Mr Salmond of that ilk, instead of calling him a liar, dictator and satanist, as laid down in the Official Book of Scottish Political Opposition.

He said Mr S was "very impressive, very single-minded … a class act". Sure, it's the sort of thing that, in pubs and discotheques across the land, people say every night about Labour's Johann Lamont and the Tories' Ruth Davidson.

But, satire aside, it was so refreshing. Not so much for its Eckophilia as for its direct, unscripted, almost naive honesty.

True, Mr B added some bog-standard, golf club rhetoric about being pro-business and cutting red tape. But, otherwise, a winsome innocence shone through his breezy words, hinting at someone for whom spin is a four-letter word.

I pray to the void that they don't capture him in a dark, Holyrood corridor and drug him with the party line.

In the grim, dripping alleys of Labourland, meanwhile, ideological muggers search desperately for another free spirit, Henry McLeish, whom they'd dearly love to cosh. Former First Minister Henry differs from Mr Buchanan in the sense that, instead of just carrying on as his old self like the Tory, he is a new man. Once an apparatchik whose every mouthtful came pre-cooked from party HQ, he's now distinctly estranged, while simultaneously maintaining a peculiar loyalty to a party that abhors him, almost as if he were working-class.

Henry's position is peculiar: his head says independence, but his heart lies with the past. Labour was his first political kiss, never forgotten, fondly cherished forever.

This week, he got lip from Labour's Unionists after giving tongue to a warning that Negative Scotland had failed to win over voters.

Forget that the analysis is flawed. Only the Yes campaign has to win over voters. Beyond careerists, sectarian nutters and Spitfire-headed Brits, No voters are overwhelmingly drawn from those with no interest in politics.

No is the default position. Yes has to convince No. No doesn't have to convince anyone. We're surrounded by No. It's in the air we breathe. No is the known.

Henry should have known he'd be savaged by a dyspeptic elephant seal lying beached and belching on the sharp, rocky shore of the constitutional debate.

I speak, as you'll have guessed, of Lord Foulkes, who accused him of "gabbling incomprehensible rubbish". Eloquently put, sir.

Similarly articulate was dependence supremo Alistair Darling's riposte to senior Labour figures who complained no-one knew what the party stood for: "This autumn I know Ed Miliband and Ed Balls will be setting out their stalls."

Stalls? Balls? What can it all mean? Perhaps it means two Eds are worse than one, but how Henry gets his head round this and stays loyal is between him and his god.

But at least he sings from his own hymn book, just as Mr Buchanan yodels from his own business ledger.

Hail to thee, blithe spirits. Let more public figures depart from the party line, including those of paranoia-racked (perhaps understandably) Yes Scotland and the SNP.

To paraphrase St Margaret of Assisi, where there is party harmony, may there be discord. Where there is spin, may there be candour.