'I’m not a Tory but I liked Ruth Davidson': How returning champion can spark revival of party's fortunes

As hard-right Conservatives take it in turns to defect to Reform, and Labour tears itself apart over the block on Andy Burnham’s ambition or whatever else Sir Keir Starmer decides, the path appears to be open for a strong centre party to capitalise.

That was the plan 45 years ago when David Steel told members of the new SDP/Liberal Alliance to “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government” as Labour lurched left under Michael Foot and Margaret Thatcher’s market revolution had yet to bear fruit. The reward in the 1983 election was 23 seats, more than the Liberals had won since 1931, but government remained a dream until the 2010 coalition.

READ MORE: Reform UK opens up five-point lead over Labour in Holyrood race

Think tank on steroids

Even with 72 Lib Dem MPs, the party is polling around 14 per cent with a platform still largely built on local activism and hardly resembles a political force on the march.

But into the gap has stepped former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson and ex-Birmingham Mayor Andy Street, with the new Prosper UK project – not a political party (and not to be confused with Prosper, the new name for the Scottish Council for Development and Industry) but what sounds like a centre-right think tank on steroids, aiming to make Conservatism the choice for around seven million centre-right voters who extensive polling for the new organisation indicates can’t find a party which represents their outlook.

Criticism of Prosper UK’s rationale, not least from fellow Scotsman columnist Brian Monteith this week, argues the Lib Dems already occupy the space and the old Conservative party is done. If so, then whatever the Lib Dems are offering, seven million voters aren’t buying.

READ MORE: Scotland faces Minnesota-style chaos as Nigel Farage plots mass deportations

Of course they could dump Ed Davey for a more forceful and serious leader and tack right from their natural soft-left territory, but then they wouldn’t be the nice, unthreatening Lib Dems they claim to be.

It’s also assumed the Prosper UK concept is based on holding Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s feet to a centre-right fire, a party within a party posing a constant threat to achieve its aims.

But the goal is to return the Conservatives to power by exploiting an opening, not through a deal with Reform that some are demanding, which smacks of desperation when the shots would be called by a party with no coherent economic strategy and led by people determined to destroy them.

READ MORE: Reform UK wants a real Holyrood policy platform – but risk cementing pie in the sky reputation

Reform councillors calling for media ban

Best, I would argue, to see how the competing egos and vaulting ambitions get along other over the next three years under an increasingly intense spotlight. Already ‘ban the media’ is a regular retreat of excitable Reform councillors and they’ve barely got going.

The threat theory also presumes Kemi Badenoch knew nothing about it, and that party chief executive Mark McInnes, to whom Ruth Davidson remains close, was also kept in the dark.

If anything, the polling analysis looks like it could have been produced by Lord McInnes and I understand the Conservative leadership knew about the project and was comfortable with its strategy. And why wouldn’t it be, given British elections have always been won by a party appealing to the centre while retaining a loyal base?

Yes, Reform has bitten deeply into the Tory core, but policies like leaving the ECHR might enable the haemorrhage on the right to be staunched while the left is rebuilt, and without Kemi Badenoch herself appearing to soften.

Her address this week – particularly her line that what mattered was not the centre ground, but common ground and common sense − was not the slap-down some thought it was. And no one has asked why there was no officially sanctioned attack on Prosper UK at its launch.

Old Tory Cabinet without the sensible ones

Prosper UK is big on aspiration but less on the “Broken Britain” narrative Robert Jenrick has been so keen to promote. It’s easy to understand why he has done so, when a survey of 20,000 people by More in Common – the same firm behind Prosper UK’s polling – found seven in ten had lost faith in politicians and wanted something new.

But that doesn’t mean they want relentless doom-mongering to depress them about the place they call home, just for things to be better. It remains to be seen if a leadership resembling an old Tory cabinet without the sensible ones, can keep convincing enough voters for the next three years that they are the answer, with little more to offer than a hard line on immigration.

But most importantly, Ruth Davidson is back on the field, happy to have Kemi Badenoch as team captain because she has no desire for high office in Westminster, and wants to spend as little time in London away from her family as possible, apart from what’s necessary to fulfil her role in the Lords.

But being the face of Prosper UK means the public will see much more of her as the programme develops, and that’s important for re-shaping the new Conservative party as the voice of the responsible right.

“I’m not a Tory but I liked Ruth Davidson” is still a common response to doorstep canvassers, and a bit of the Davidson magic won’t do Kemi Badenoch’s growing self-assurance any harm at all. A Badenoch-Davidson alliance could be just what the Tories need to counter Reform’s charmless brand of anger.

And although late in the day, it might just give Russell Findlay’s Holyrood election campaign a boost that the latest polling shows it badly needs. It ain’t over ’til it’s over, and Ruth Davidson isn’t done.