To split or not to split - the big question facing winner of race to be new Scottish Conservative leader

In 2011, if you thought Tory, you didn’t necessarily think 32-year-old working-class Lesbian from Fife. Davidson stood out from day one of the leadership contest by looking nothing like a member of her party.

After years of seemingly interminable decline in the polls, the Scottish Tories decided to take a punt on the former BBC journalist. For many members, the rationale behind their vote was no more sophisticated than “we’ve nothing left to lose”.

It was thanks to good fortune rather than good judgement that those Tories selected as their leader a politician of uncommon talent who would breathe life into their party and take it into second place in the polls while pushing Labour into third.

But it’s almost five years since Ruth Davidson quit as leader of the Scottish Conservatives and, today, the party finds itself firmly back in nothing-left-to-lose territory.

In last week’s General Election, Labour took 37 of 57 Scottish seats, the SNP nine, the Liberal Democrats six and the Tories just five. The general election result confirmed both Scottish Labour’s revival and the SNP’s decline. Neither was good news for the Tories. A viable Labour Party put an end to the Conservative line that only they could be trusted to stand up for those who supported the Union in 2014’s referendum, while a floundering SNP ruined the Tory line that a divisive second referendum was on the cards.

The Scottish Conservatives’ woes are compounded by the manner in which leader Douglas Ross decided to resign his position.

Already unpopular among members of the Tories’ Holyrood group (“We wanted rid of him, just not like this,” says one MSP) Ross infuriated colleagues when he announced his decision, during the General Election campaign, to stand for the seat of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. David Duguid – who had taken the seat for the Tories in 2017 – was deselected as the party’s candidate on health grounds (very much against his will) and Ross installed in his stead, promising that he would resign as an MSP if he was elected to Westminster.

Entertainingly, Ross lost. So he now sits in Holyrood as a rather isolated figure, unpopular with colleagues and serving constituents who now have every right to believe he views representing them in the Scottish Parliament as a consolation prize.

If, before the election, Ross had asked for advice on how he might, for maximum efficiency, alienate colleagues and voters at the same time, his is the sort of ridiculous behaviour you might suggest. It is difficult to imagine how he might have handled the past few weeks any more ineptly.

First to officially declare her candidacy to replace Ross is his current deputy, Meghan Gallacher, who wrote in Saturday’s Daily Express that last Thursday’s “disappointing” results were an “opportunity for a reset”.

For lovers of meaningless bromides, there was much more to feast on. Now, for example, was the moment to rebuild the party “both internally and externally”.

On the question – first proposed during the 2011 leadership campaign by runner-up Murdo Fraser and now at the centre of this one – of whether the Scottish Tories should break from the UK party and rebrand, under a new constitution, Gallacher was unequivocal: She could see no benefits from breaking away from the UK party.

Despite making no public declaration on the question of leadership, West of Scotland MSP Russell Findlay is already looking like the candidate to beat in the race to replace Ross.

Like Davidson, Findlay is a former journalist (an award-winning crime reporter for the tabloids), with a bit of presence in the debating chamber and a quick mind. He has impressed with sharp questioning as deputy convener of Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee and colleagues say his input into Ross’s speeches remains invaluable.

“If Douglas has has a decent line in the last three years there’s every chance Russell came up with it,” says one colleague.

While Findlay has kept quiet on his leadership ambitions, his chum and fellow MSP Rachael Hamilton, has hit back at briefing from some quarters of the Scottish Conservatives that he would be an “establishment” candidate.

Now, perhaps Hamilton and Findlay had no contact whatsoever in advance of a piece she wrote for The Daily Telegraph about how he would make the best next leader of their party but, well, I’d find that pretty weird, wouldn’t you?

Findlay might not have spoken publicly yet about whether he fancies his chances of replacing Ross but “sources close to” him have been out on manoeuvres and they have let it be known that he, too, is a sceptic when it comes to the idea of replacing the Scottish Conservatives with a new centre-right party.

The man who proposed the idea in the first place, Murdo Fraser, is – conveniently and actually – out of the country so we don’t, yet, know whether he plans to put it to the members again.

Of course the Tory “establishment” doesn’t like Fraser’s idea – it is the Conservative and Unionist Party, after all – but should party members consider it?

After all, what have they got in return for years of loyalty? They’ve been humiliated and infuriated by the behaviour of colleagues at Westminster and paid the price for it in countless elections.

If the same Tory grandees who decided in 2020 that Douglas Ross should be the new Scottish party leader now wish Russell Findlay to take charge, then he is likely to do so.

But, if he remains hitched to the sleaze-ridden and discredited UK Tory Party, he’ll be hobbling his leadership from day one.