Today was Malcolm Offord’s big day.
The former Conservative peer - Malcolm Offord, Baron Offord of Garvel - arrived in Greenock to announce he will stand for Reform at Holyrood in Inverclyde.
Inside the Beacon Arts Centre, overlooking the Clyde on a bright but cold Friday morning at the start of spring - the season of rebirth - a room of just under twenty Reform members greeted the declaration with a polite, slightly limp clap.
Outside the windows sat the kind of view campaign launches dream of: the Clyde stretching past the docks and, as Offord made sure to point out in some detail, Garvel Point.
Garvel has long been central to the Offord origin story. When he entered the House of Lords in 2022, he chose the title Lord Offord of Garvel - a nod to the place and to his roots as a self-described “Greenock boy”.
“I grew up here. I went to school here,” he said proudly.
“I went to Edinburgh University and then I went on to London,” he added briskly.
Then, more emphatically: “I still have family in the town. My mother still lives here just around the corner.”
READ MORE:
- Police Scotland distance themselves from Glasgow 'vigilante' group
- Malcolm Offord rejects 'vigilante' group claims in Glasgow
These days his professional base lies quite a bit further east. His investment firm, Badenoch & Co, operates from Charlotte Square in Edinburgh - right beside Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister.
With polling suggesting Reform could make significant gains in Scotland in May, it is not hard to see why the address might hold a certain appeal.
Some polls have placed Reform on course to become the second-largest party at Holyrood.
Yet the party’s Scottish leader remains something of an unknown entity to many voters. A recent Diffley Partnership poll found 61% of respondents said they did not know enough about Offord to form a view.
Mr Offord will be hoping the far more widely recognised figure of Nigel Farage can help boost the party’s fortunes as the election approaches but it must sting to feel like you are forever in his shadow.
For a while it seemed the launch might drift gently along the same nostalgic and snooze-inducing current.
Offord spoke about Greenock, peppering his remarks with local geography and personal recollections. The speech was heavy on place names and light on policy.
He did emphasise that Reform would focus on the economy, reiterating his pledge to shake up Scotland’s tax system by making income tax rates 1p lower than in the rest of the UK.
But economists say the policy would come with difficult trade-offs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said lowering Scottish income tax below UK levels is “legitimate and feasible” - but warned it would require a credible plan for spending cuts and could mean difficult decisions over public services.
Once journalists were allowed to ask questions, the mood shifted.
Suddenly, the topic was not Garvel Point.
It was vigilantes. Or rather, according to Offord, not vigilantes.
Reform’s UK leader in Scotland has rejected claims an organised group patrolling the streets of Glasgow at night were 'vigilantes'.
Malcolm Offord told journalists he had joined a patrol with the group North2South – who are claiming to be protecting women.
He said there are… pic.twitter.com/vg2E8fq0ia— The Herald (@heraldscotland) March 6, 2026
“They are not vigilante groups,” he insisted of a group he had recently joined on a night patrol in Glasgow. North2South, he explained, was set up by a husband-and-wife team and involves “a group of dads” who patrol the city centre between 9pm and 2am.
Giving his reasoning as to why they were not vigilantes, Mr Offord said: “They’re not armed. They are not.
"They are a bunch of volunteers, wearing hi-vis jackets saying North2South on the back, with police permission."
Police Scotland, however, has since said it does not “endorse, condone or encourage” the group’s activity and does not work with its members.
The idea of the group, he said, was simple: protect the women leaving bars and nightclubs who told organisers they felt unsafe.
“They don’t have an agenda other than to keep people safe,” he said.
Critics, however, point to footage circulating online which paints a rather different picture.
In videos posted by the North2South group, men can be seen patrolling Glasgow streets in balaclavas and high-visibility jackets.
Offord remained unmoved.
“I think it’s a great shame that we have this in our society,” he told The Herald.
“We don’t want this in our society. But don’t blame the people who are trying to look after their own.
“Blame civic society… those in control of the system.”
In Offord’s telling, the deeper problem is not citizen patrols but a system that has allowed communities to feel unsafe in the first place.
Glasgow’s city centre, he argued, has been “hollowed out” and “not as safe as it used to be”.
The conversation drifted toward immigration and housing pressures.
“Where you’ve got a shortage of housing, it becomes an immigration issue because you are working out where does the housing go.”
Offord described visiting hotels housing asylum seekers near Sauchiehall Street and a homeless shelter where, he said, there were relatively few “locals”.
Local people, he argued, risk being “pushed out” of affordable housing.
“We need to find a way to help people who come into Scotland,” he said.
“But we don’t do that in a way which intimidates our own local population.”
Later, Offord also sought to clarify his position on another issue: faith schools.
He had previously suggested closing faith-based schools could help tackle sectarianism -a sensitive proposal in Scotland, where Catholic schools have a long and politically significant history. But speaking to LBC, the Reform Scottish leader quickly rowed that back in a reversal that added a sense of mixed messaging around his campaign.
Offord insisted Inverclyde was the natural place to begin his electoral journey.
“When I joined Reform, the question was where would I stand,” he said.
“For me there was only one place.
“In a way Inverclyde is almost like a microcosm of Scotland. The issues we need to deal with across Scotland, we need to deal with them here too.
“It’s almost like if we can solve one, we can solve the other.”
Whether Reform can solve either remains to be seen. A full Reform candidate list is expected on March 19 and further, detailed policies are still expected to come.
But on Friday morning in Greenock, one thing was clear: Malcolm Offord had come home - and the conversation quickly sailed far beyond Garvel Point, into waters the former Lord at times seemed less comfortable navigating.
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