Dear oh dear. Things haven’t been going well for for the Green party lately and now they’ve just got a whole lot worse. The Green’s first UK parliamentarian and former leader of the Scottish Greens Robin Harper has quit the party, announcing that the Greens have ‘lost the plot’. Mr S wonders how long it took him to notice – has he been living under a rock?

In a scathing letter written to his successors ‘after lengthy consideration’, the octogenarian let loose on the party he’s been part of for decades. Berating the party’s leftwards move ‘into the gap’ vacated by the Scottish Socialist party, the former MSP raged about the Scottish Greens’ preoccupation with ‘needlessly destroy[ing] the United Kingdom’, the party’s handling of trans issues and its inability to ‘cooperate meaningfully’ within politics. ‘Elected representatives should listen as much as they shout,’ he reprimanded his former colleagues. Ouch.

Steerpike finds it hardly surprising that Harper has seen red. The Scottish Green party’s co-leaders Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie have been effective at forcing their policies into government debates — at the expense of the good people of Scotland.

The deposit return scheme has imploded spectacularly, leaving behind redundancies and debts of over £80 million. The controversial gender bill, backed by the Scottish Greens, would have housed rapists in women’s prisons. The dreaded fishing bans pushed by the party have been labelled ‘catastrophic’ for rural communities. And the environmentalists are opposed to road building — despite Scotland’s most dangerous road remaining in desperate need of dualling. Mr S wonders what exactly the party are good for…

Harper’s outburst comes a week after SNP politician Fergus Ewing urged First Minister Humza Yousaf to end his ‘dalliance’ with the Greens. When even their own members are deserting them, it’s hard not to conclude the party is in dire straits…