THE “Greatest Showman” PT Barnum once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”, but has the SNP’s ambitious Westminster group leader, Stephen Flynn, misjudged his own capacity for showmanship?

Judging by the thorny responses in Holyrood and beyond to his announcement last week that he wants to displace his party colleague and convenor of the busy Criminal Justice Committee, Audrey Nicoll MSP, he may have overestimated his personal ticket draw.

The timing of audacious Flynn’s proposed parliamentary plate-spinning is interesting. It has forced his party leadership, colleagues and members into juggling a series of contradictory stances on party rules and “principles” with an imminent Scottish Budget announcement, and the critical 2026 Holyrood elections just around the next Budget corner. With friends like these, who needs opposition parties?

Flynn’s assumption that he could fit in a part-time second job in our Scottish Parliament requires selling his self-professed “big hitter” label as worth the stooshie.

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However, despite some witty stand-ups at PMQs, his delivery scorecard remains threadbare, losing most of his group’s MPs in July. Critically, he must assess whether his personal “job grab” plans are in the best interests of the people he proposes to represent, and to Scotland.

As we enter the 25th year of Holyrood, it’s crucial to remember that there is still much work to do to ensure our national parliament processes and procedures are fit for purpose; that they support the production of sound, workable legislation through effective scrutiny at all stages in committee and chamber debates, and ultimately improve lives in Scotland. To achieve this, we must always centre robust representation, be solution-focused – and, crucially, be alive to the democratic wishes of the electorate.

The much-anticipated pause to the National Care Service Bill must surely put the real focus on the inherent dangers of using framework bills for complex legislation.

I supported Jackie Baillie’s amendment to send this bill back to the committee at Stage One and hope there is an objective reflection on the value of deep understanding and scrutiny at the committee stage before presenting such fundamentally important legislation to Parliament.

This bill has much value if done right, but it has lost its entire purpose and effect and, thus, the confidence of the Parliament. On a similar note, emergency bills now appear more frequently – yet for robust scrutiny, these must be avoided save for the most exceptional circumstances.

How can Parliament itself be shaped to best serve the Scottish electorate’s needs to produce good law? Suppose voters determine to shake things up in 2026 by sending smaller parties and independents to represent them at Holyrood – will the working definition of “party” as five or more MSPs be sustainable to cover all the critical committee work, the Scottish Parliament Bureau and the corporate body, in addition to an MSP’s legislative and constituency work.

As parliamentarians, we serve at the pleasure of the electorate, so we must ensure that our systems avoid unintended consequences and are flexible to the parliamentary make-up that our electorate determines.

Last week, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee produced recommendations on a gender-sensitive audit in a laudable attempt to ensure a balance between men and women in parliamentary representation. Still, I offer some caution regarding the unintended consequences of any engineered mechanisms.

Currently, 46% of MSPs are women – with Alba, Greens, and SNP having a majority of female MSPs, and Labour having 45%, Tories having 29%, and LibDems with 25%. As committees cannot have government ministers or presiding officers on them, this makes for a push-me-pull-you situation for women MSPs on committees when 57% of the government is women, and two of the three (depute) Presiding Officers are women. While this is positive for women, on the one hand, it also leaves fewer women to cover more committee work if a gender balance is mandated.

Of course, the “elephant in the Holyrood room” that has tripped up successive first ministers over the past few years is absurdly: “What is a woman?”

Spoiler alert: a woman is and always will be an adult human female – yet Scottish ministers are about to go to the Supreme Court to defend the guidance to their Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018.

This guidance permits males with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) to be included in the target for public boards to have 50% women non-executive members. Effectively, public boards could meet this target with a 100% male board, as long as 50% had a GRC – was that really the intention of a law whose stated purpose was to increase the number of women on public boards?

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If Scotland is to restore and sustain public confidence in our representation process, it will not be by limiting voters’ choices from the output of a political party’s internally-managed equality mechanisms. Such selection engineering, now tying the SNP in knots as circumstances change, demonstrates that even the noblest intentions can have severe unintended consequences.

If the goal is building public trust through competent representation, parties must realise that effective parliamentary representation is not only essential but requires concentration and scrutiny of legislative detail. All parties must seek to achieve this by identifying and removing barriers so their members can access opportunities and support to represent at all levels.

Only by having candidates who are genuinely representative of a party’s best offerings can the electorate have a real choice as to who will best represent them, and our Parliament achieve a representative balance set by voters.

The indomitable Winnie Ewing’s assessment of the role of SNP MPs at Westminster was “to settle up, not settle down”, and this must guide those of us who believe that Scotland’s best democratic future can only be shaped through self-determination in Scotland for Scotland.

Madame Ecosse would surely concur with my addendum to her instruction for those seeking to serve the Scottish people in the Parliament that she reconvened 25 years ago. Shape up!