: Yesterday, Alex-Cole-Hamilton gave his first speech as Scottish Leader to Conference. It was delayed, despite being pre-recorded. Some technical hitch meant that we had to vote to allow the agenda to change so they could sort it out.

Watch here:

Filmed outside Holyrood in the sunshine, he paid tribute to his predecessor Willie Rennie and other Scottish Liberal legends Jim Wallace, Jo Swinson and Charles Kennedy.

He talked about how the party under him will offer new hope to a Scotland whose public services were struggling due to SNP neglect even before the pandemic.

“We are a people trapped between flags” he said of the SNP’s Scottish Nationalism and Boris Johnson’s Brexit nationalism.

He said we would oppose a second independence referendum because the “relentless constitutional drumbeat” holds us back.

Addressing the drugs deaths crisis in Scotland, the highest in Europe, he revealed that he wrote to the Director General of the World Health Organisation to send a task force to Scotland “to help get this disaster under control”

He attacked the Greens now in a not-a-coalition with the SNP for putting independence above saving the planet.

The second policy initiative he introduced were to make electric cars more affordable and accessible. He wants people to be able to try them for free.

He ended with an invitation to “come with us” if you want to stand up to state intrusion in your lives, action on the future of the planet, the best education in the world, help for carers, human rights at home and abroad and less state intrusion and to tackle the mental health catastrophe.

It was a very public facing speech and one which will be punted out far and wide over the next wee while.