Nominations for candidates wanting to stand in the Scottish Tory leadership contest close today. One candidate has already voluntarily dropped out, and it’s not clear if all of the remaining five will receive the 100 votes they need from the membership to progress to the next stage. Already there has been much drama, with some contenders even suggesting the race be paused after revelations about outgoing leader Douglas Ross came to light. Yet as the Scottish Conservative leadership contest descends into internecine warfare, one could be mistaken for believing that at stake is something of importance, something of value. But the uncomfortable truth is: it doesn’t really matter who runs Scotland’s only mainstream centre-right party.
The role as the leader of Scotland’s centre-right party should of course be of value, one which oscillates between being the leader of the opposition and being the First Minister like it does in our nearest neighbours. In Ireland, Simon Harris’s centre-right Fine Gael occupy the government office in Merrion Street. In Sweden, Ulf Kristersson of the centre-right Moderate party has the keys to Sager House and next door in Finland, Petteri Orpo’s Kokoomus party ousted the centre-left last year. All over northern, central and southern Europe, centre-right parties are either in government or ready to be. But this isn’t the case in Scotland, where the centre-right Tories have never set foot in Bute House and have a level of expectation of doing so at somewhere approaching zero.
Why doesn’t it matter who leads the Tory group in Holyrood? Firstly there is no prospect of this person being First Minister yet. In Scotland, becoming First Minister means winning two elections. Even after a miracle in which the Tories win over the country in a Holyrood general election, in order to be in power the party’s leader also has to win a vote amongst his or her 129 MSP colleagues. Given that they sit in a proportionally representative Parliament with four other parties who are sworn against ever working with them, all roads look closed.
Had they inherited Davidson’s ‘mojo’? Or had they inherited a hyper-tense constitutional stand-off where indyref 2 remained a clear and present danger?
The second reason why it does not matter who leads this party is that there is not a jot of psephological, electoral or political evidence that the identity of the leader of the Scottish Tory party influences the votes gained by the Scottish Tory party. Indeed, all the evidence is to the contrary. This is not a message the party enjoys hearing. They look to the days of Ruth Davidson’s leadership and believe that their relative electoral success was based on personality rather than on politics. If only. Sadly, although Davidson was an excellent leader who, in another life and for another party, could have been First Minister, there is really no evidence for this semi-religious belief.
Davidson took over the leadership in 2011. In 2015’s general election, nearly four years into her leadership, she polled less than 15 per cent. It was in fact the party’s worst ever Westminster general election result; in 2010 Annabel Goldie polled nearly 17 per cent and David McLetchie polled just under 16 per cent in both 2005 and 2001. One year later, in the 2016 Holyrood election, the vote share suddenly spiked to 22 per cent. Why? Was it because of the Ruth Davidson ‘mojo’, which the candidates have been tripping over themselves to laud, apparently not present between 2011 and 2015 but bursting to the surface over the following year? Or might it have been because the SNP won a landslide victory in 2015, putting ‘indyref 2’ firmly on the table, at the same time as Jeremy Corbyn took control of the Labour Party and made clear he was agnostic about Scottish independence and the preservation of the UK? Might it have been because Labour voters took fright, held their noses, and voted for the party which they thought best placed to preserve the UK?
Because, of course, Davidson’s exit from the leadership appeared not to dent the party’s electoral appeal. The unfairly maligned Jackson Carlaw, removed from the leadership ostensibly because certain figures in the party believed him to be performing poorly, polled 25 per cent in the 2019 general election. His replacement, Douglas Ross, nudged the Tory vote to an all-time-Holyrood-high of over 23 per cent in the 2021 Scottish election, keeping every one of Davidson’s 31 seats. Had they inherited Davidson’s ‘mojo’? Or had they inherited a hyper-tense constitutional stand-off where indyref 2 remained a clear and present danger?
Between 2021 and 2024, the SNP suffered something of a collapse in voting intention and the Supreme Court effectively ended the prospect of a second independence referendum. Lo and behold, Ross’s 23 per cent vote share evaporated, resulting in the lowest share ever seen by the Tory party in Scotland at last month’s election. For reasons which appear to evade many Tory strategists, these votes rushed into the open arms of Labour.
I know all of the aforementioned people. They are good people – as are the candidates in the upcoming leadership election. But let us not kid ourselves. The identity of the leader of this party does not matter, because their electoral fortune is for the most part fixed for them, not created by them. Much of the past electoral success of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party has been built upon the tension it has with a previously invigorated pro-independence force. Now that the strength of the SNP is waning, so is the support of the Scottish Tories. They will find this uncomfortable truth out for themselves come May 2026.