We need more political parodies like the SNP's 'Davey Torrance'

The video is set during a house party – because that’s where all the best politics happens – and opens with guests complaining that Davey is “banging on about politics again”.

Davey is a bespectacled, smartly dressed man with a landscaped beard and obvious distain for the SNP. He shouts to the room full of people: “But what has the SNP government ever done for us?” The guests – who seem like great fun – start listing the Government’s achievements, such as scrapping tuition fees and building the new Queensferry Crossing.

READ MORE: The LibDems are really angry about the SNP's 'David Torrance' video

On social media, some jokingly suggested that the SNP based the Davey character on journalist and commentator David Torrance – also a smartly dressed man with an impressive beard, and a pantomime-villain figure among some independence and SNP supporters.

Whether or not a cantankerous soul at SNP HQ deliberately chose somebody who bore a passing resemblance to a journalist they have previously locked horns with, we don’t know.

It doesn’t really matter. Party political broadcasts are not aimed at the activists, party members or political anoraks who would see Davey and instantly think David Torrance. They are for ordinary voters, the kind that don’t already know the SNP are responsible for the introduction of the baby boxes, nor have the first clue about which journalists they may have low down on their Christmas card list.

While some were sure that the casting was a dig at Torrance, others claimed he was based on Labour’s Duncan Hothersall. And the Daily Record’s political editor, David Clegg, jokingly claimed credit for inspiring the character.

It seems the SNP employed that canny advertising trick of making party-pooper Davey whoever we wanted him to be.

Taking the speculation a bit too far was LibDem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton. He was so certain of the SNP’s vision for their new video that he wrote to Ofcom to complain about the way in which the party “lampooned” a Scottish journalist with their Davey character; and said his inclusion amounted to a “worrying challenge to freedom of the press”.

He also complained that the SNP breached the broadcasting code, in terms of accuracy, in his complaint to Ofcom and in a motion in Parliament, saying: “In a segment of the broadcast the script claimed that an achievement of the SNP government was the introduction of free personal care for the elderly.”

The broadcast didn’t in fact claim that the SNP government introduced the policy (it was introduced by the Labour-LibDem coalition in 2002) but its inclusion on a list of other things “the SNP have done for us’’ nevertheless proved contentious. In response to the charge of being deliberately misleading about their achievements, some on Twitter pointed out that the SNP have maintained free personal care for the elderly despite austerity and, as such, including it on the list of achievements is justified.

You’ve got to admire Cole-Hamilton’s brazen ownership of the mantle of “accuracy” though, given his party’s past difficulties with the truth. The infamous abandoned tuition fees pledge and the memory of Alistair Carmichael’s #FrenchMemoGate porky pies and court proceedings are still fresh in the minds of voters. Recently, there were rumblings of disapproval when LibDem MP Jo Swinson was awarded a CBE, despite being investigated by the Police Scotland over spending in the General Election. Let he whose party has never knowingly or inadvertently misled voters cast the first stone, etc.

It is my fervent hope that this moderately entertaining stooshie will start a trend for all party political broadcasts to follow. I demand to be able to play spot the score-settling in each one.

Perhaps in Scottish Labour’s we’ll see an Alex Salmond look-a-like being loudly heckled by Richard Leonard or gently chastised in a heart-not-really-in-it kind of way from Jeremy Corbyn.

The Scottish Greens would be missing a trick if they didn’t get their own back for the relentless cheek that Murdo Fraser dished out to them last year.

Sadly, I fear the LibDems are probably too mature to get involved in such silliness, so they should just have Willie Rennie fleeing down a soft-play slide shouting “WILLIE RENNIE!!” on a loop.

And as for the Scottish Conservatives; if there isn’t a National columnist brutally lampooned in one of their future party political broadcasts then I personally will be extremely disappointed.

Far be it for me to use my column to lobby the Tories but I’d just like to point out that I’m quite easy to imitate.

Red lipstick, resting bitch face: it will be uncanny. Lampoon away.