Why are the SNP and LibDems so frightened by the Scottish Conservative challenge in Ross, Skye and Lochaber?
The SNP leader in Westminster, Ian "five jobs" Blackford, is running scared. After a lacklustre campaign in 2017 that saw his vote fall by over 4600, whilst the Scottish Conservative vote went up by almost 7000, Blackford knows that he is on borrowed time.
A man for whom the term bloviate could have been coined especially, Blackford rarely misses a chance to speak in Westminster, but recycles his material with such enthusiasm that you only need listen to any one contribution to the House at random to get the idea: SNP the best thing ever, everyone else wrong about everything else, Indy Refs ad infinitum until he gets the result he wants.
And whilst the diligent Scottish Conservative MPs in Westminster have lobbied hard to gain many advantages for rural Scotland, not least substantial additional support payments for farmers, Blackford can boast only of helping deny the democratic will of the 17.4 million UK citizens who voted to leave the EU. He is of course proud of once being ejected from the Chamber by the Speaker - the kind of publicity stunt that highlights his predilection for style over substance.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are busy desperately trying to talk up their candidate, knowing that he has a whole stack of Munros to climb if he is going to reverse by even the smallest amount the catastrophic collapse in the LibDem vote in 2017, down almost 7000. Terrified of the rapidly-growing possibility of an equally bad result this time around, the LibDems are apparently peddling the line to anyone who will listen that the only way to see off Blackford is for Labour and Conservative supporters to "vote tactically" in support of the LibDem candidate.
That is a bit rich for a party that has demonstrated such utter contempt for the votes of the 52% - the democratic majority - who voted to leave the EU, votes that it wants to overturn by diktat. Some votes it seems are worth more than others........and these people have the gall to call themselves Democrats.
So just as with the vast majority of Scottish constituencies, if in Ross, Skye and Lochaber you vote LibDem you will just help perpetuate SNP ineffectiveness and risk giving the separatists another "once in a generation" chance to try to destroy the Union.