Nigel Farage to be the figurehead of Reform UK's 2026 Scottish election campaign

More than 300 people descended on Perth on Saturday for a packed-out Scottish conference for Reform, but the party leader was missing in action.

The party was forced to deny Mr Farage was “scared” of coming to Scotland, with his deputy Richard Tice MP telling journalists: “Nigel loves Scotland.”

Mr Tice added: “We can’t be everywhere at once. Nigel will be coming in January or February, but it is quite a big country and we are trying to grow quickly.

“Nigel is the most popular political leader across the whole of the United Kingdom.”

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The party is feeling “optimistic” about the 2026 Holyrood election, Mr Tice said. He also promised Reform would stand in every constituency and region, but conceded “no-one conquers Scotland”.

He referred to the election as “the Holyrood thing”, and said the party would secure a “meaningful” number of seats and be a “key player”.

However, Mr Tice ruled out doing a deal with the SNP and said he “neither knows nor cares” about Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay.

Mr Tice also would not divulge if he was speaking to any current MSPs about defecting to Reform.

Elsewhere Mr Tice said Scotland should let its offshore wind farms naturally “expire” and instead focus on oil and gas, nuclear and fracking.

He said: “There’s no other major nation in the world that has huge quantities of energy treasure under its feet that makes the utterly negligent decision to leave it there.

“Why do you think America’s electricity is a third of the cost of ours? Because they’re using shale gas and their own energy treasure, and that’s what we’ve got to do in this country. It’s the fastest way to make everybody better off.

“Where are all these great green jobs that were promised in Scotland? There’s a few hundred of them - there are hundreds of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industry.”

He also said the cost-of-living crisis was down to the “madness” of not having a competitive energy market, and suggested the operating costs of renewables such as offshore wind farms were “way higher than predicted”.

Elsewhere one of the biggest cheers of the conference was for party chairman Zia Yusuf, who launched a scathing attack on former first minister Humza Yousaf.

Mr Yusuf said the former first minister had made a speech recently that was “one of the most despicable and racist speeches of any world leader”.

He said: “There he stood pontificating in the Scottish Parliament and his voice and body language was dripping with hate and disdain. Let’s clear something up here - there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with being white.”

Mr Yusuf said the SNP was against the values of family, community and country, and stessed the SNP was “less Scotland and more Soviet Union”. He also said divisive rhetoric in mainstream politics had “enabled the left to divide and conquer”.

Mr Yusuf pledged to ensure no one earning under £20,000 a year would pay any income tax. Meanwhile outside the conference was a noisy protest of anti-racism campaigners.

Catriona Mackay, from Perth Against Racism, branded Mr Farage a "disingenuous little cretin”, and said “people need to wake up and see him for what he is”.