Just as there is (apparently) more than one way to skin a cat, the last week has shown there is more than one way to run an election campaign.
Convention tends towards the cautious and – small c – conservative method that we see practiced by Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.
They make speeches to bleary-eyed activists and visit bewildered businesses.
They play (or try to play) football with kids and pose behind the counters of cafes or wandering around building sites.
Occasionally, they are even put in front of actual voters, the leaders’ faces contorted with the fear of either being shouted at or inadvertently calling someone a bigot.
There is, of course, an alternative to this straightforward form of campaigning and it can often be extremely effective.
Boris Johnson drove a digger through a brick wall, Jim Murphy traversed Scotland standing on an Irn-Bru crate and much-missed Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie made a major policy announcement in front of a pair of fornicating pigs.
All of these methods, unlike the more cautious ones, live long in the memory.
But the SNP has, extraordinarily, found an even more novel way to campaign.
Chaotic campaign
It began unconventionally, with the party’s leader, John Swinney, jetting off on day one of the campaign to one of the most remote and least populated parts of Scotland. Or at least trying to.
His hopes of winning over the dyed-in-the-wool-socks-in-the-sandals Liberal Democrat voters of Shetland were dashed by fog, which made it unsafe to land.
The SNP leader was thus left to spend the first day of his campaign with perhaps a dozen frustrated fellow passengers, at about 25,000 feet, circling the skies somewhere over Wick, with a steep descent still to come.
This could have been dismissed as an eccentric blip but the SNP’s campaign over the last week has mirrored this strategy closely.
In a brave forswearing of campaign convention, Swinney has chosen not to focus on the issues that matter to voters, such as the economy or the NHS.
This might lead you to believe he is instead pursuing a core vote strategy, focusing on independence and how this election will – finally, finally, finally, pinky promise this time – be the one to break Westminster’s resolve.
But the SNP isn’t doing that, either.
Instead, once Swinney was safely back on terra firma, he set about defending his SNP colleague – and self-confessed benefit cheat – Michael Matheson from punishment by a cross-party parliamentary standards committee.
To describe this as an unconventional way to campaign could be used as a dictionary illustration of understatement.
That I only have to write Matheson and you immediately think of an iPad, £11,000 and a Riad illustrates the problem the SNP faces on this issue.
The fact Matheson has been handed a record punishment – a 27-day suspension and the loss of salary for 54 days – only adds to the perception that this is a man who has done something wrong, but whose friends are nevertheless trying to get him off the hook.
And you do not have to be Sir John Curtice to know that erroneous and egregious expense claims, coupled with a healthy dose of cronyism, are not popular with the public at large.
‘Nicola Sturgeon threatening to enter the fray’
This is all the more bizarre – and, one must imagine, frustrating for the sensible SNP MPs whose jobs are on the line – because it was never supposed to be this way.
The Matheson saga has rumbled on for months and months and the SNP leadership has had plenty of time to get its position prepared.
Swinney was supposed to be competent, the veritable “safe pair of hands” who would put a stop to the chaos and constant missteps of his predecessor.
Instead, he is increasingly looking to be as incompetent as Humza Yousaf but without the youthful exuberance or mitigation of inexperience.
Those in the SNP who hope the Matheson saga will be the last of the party’s forays into the unconventional campaign playbook should not hold their breath, either.
Apparently not content with just the one scandal dominating their campaign, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is now also threatening to enter the fray too.
Thus, the hopes of the SNP managing to return to a core message that resonates with voters – rather than alienates them – is rapidly diminishing.
A cynic might point out that this is because the SNP does not actually have a worthwhile core message in a general election that is a straight fight between the Conservatives and Labour.
But convention dictates it would be worth the nationalists at least giving it a try.
After all, if a leader bulldozing his way through a brick wall or making a speech in front of rutting swine is running a more conventional campaign than you, it is safe to say you are in big trouble.
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