I HAD TO UIT FOR MY FAMILY
■ Ruth holds back tears as she resigns as Scots Tory leader ■ Reveals sense of dread as job took toll on loved ones ■ Issues plea for respect in politics – but backs Boris
RUTH Davidson said she had to put family life before politics as she confirmed her departure as Scottish Tory leader yesterday.
In an announcement that sent major tremors through UK politics, an emotional Miss Davidson confirmed that
she is standing down for both ‘professional and personal’ reasons.
She admitted the thought of a snap general election followed by the Holyrood poll in 2021 ‘fills me with dread’.
The Edinburgh Central MSP said the arrival of her first son, ten-month-old Finn, meant she can no longer put her party first, and confessed she had previously been a ‘poor daughter, sister, partner and friend’.
Miss Davidson also issued a late plea to
Boris Johnson to secure a Brexit deal with the EU, and urged MPs to back it.
Writing in today’s Scottish Daily Mail, she admits that the ‘hardening’ of political debate in Scotland has had ‘an effect on my family’ and that it is ‘time for some new blood’ after eight years in charge.
Her spokesman confirmed that Miss Davidson first considered quitting a year ago and discussed this with colleagues on the morning of the European Parliament elections in May.
He also insisted she fully supports Mr Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament in the run-up to Brexit, and her decision to quit has nothing to do with the PM.
Announcing her resignation at a press conference in Edinburgh, Miss Davidson called it the ‘privilege of my life’ to serve as leader.
She admitted feeling ‘conflict’ over Brexit but ‘the biggest change’ had been starting a family. ‘As I look to the future, I see the Scottish election due in 2021 and a credible threat from our opponents to force a general election before then,’ Miss Davidson said. But the thought of 20 months on the road to fight elections ‘fills me with dread – and that is no way to lead’.
‘Additionally, I fear that having tried to be a good leader over the years, I have proved a poor daughter, sister, partner and friend. The party and my work has always come first, often at the expense of commitments to loved ones. The arrival of my son means I now make a different choice,’ she added.
Miss Davidson’s resignation will trigger a leadership contest, although deputy leader Jackson Carlaw will take interim charge.
‘The party has always come first’
Party bosses will decide whether to start the contest at the October recess or delay it until later, such as when Brexit happens.
Miss Davidson said her fight to keep Scotland in the UK in 2014 was ‘the most important contribution’ of her working life. Colleagues believe that she could be a frontrunner to lead another pro-Union campaign if there is a second independence referendum.
But she said the Scottish independence and EU referendums had ‘split Scotland’ and such future votes must be used ‘to affirm public opinion but not as a way for political leaders to fail to lead’.
She added: ‘Looking at the division in our politics I make this plea. The vast majority of people who go into politics do so for the right reasons – to improve their communities and their countries. I believe we should always remember that.
‘Respect is what is missing from our debates and without respect you cannot understand and you cannot unite, which is what we in Scotland and the UK need to do.’
While she did not back Mr Johnson in the recent Tory leadership campaign, she made clear in her resignation letter that she would ‘continue to support the party, the Prime Minister and Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom’.
Miss Davidson, who will continue to serve as an MSP until the next Holyrood election in 2021, confirmed that she urged Mr Johnson to secure a Brexit deal when she informed him on Wednesday evening of her resignation.
In a plea to MPs, she said: ‘If the Prime Minister brings a deal back to the House of Commons, as I know he is trying to do, for God’s sake get behind it this time, at the fourth time of asking.’ She added: ‘There has been a lot written about my relationship with the Prime Minister. I went down to Downing Street to meet him last week, to meet him in a private meeting. I stared him in the eye and I asked him outright, “look, are you actually trying to get a deal or not?”
‘He categorically assured me that he was, that he believes that his efforts in Biarritz [at the G7] have helped open the door a crack.
‘What would help further would be for people who want to avoid No Deal, to come out and say that if a deal is brought back to Parliament, that they would back it, in the way that they have failed to do three times already. So I want him to get that deal. I believe that’s what he and his government are working towards – and I support him in those efforts.’
It is understood that the Prime Minister did not try to persuade Miss Davidson to stay because she had clearly made up her mind.
She told colleagues on the morning of the European elections in
May that she was considering stepping down but they urged her to take some time to think it over before reaching a final decision.
Miss Davidson’s official spokesman insisted that the decision was ‘not at all’ down to Mr Johnson becoming Prime Minister, but admitted her conflict over supporting Remain and the 2016 referendum result ‘was a factor’. He added that yesterday’s announcement had nothing to do with Mr Johnson proroguing parliament, and that the press conference was planned on Monday.
He said: ‘She supports the Prime Minister on this, in the sense that she thinks that’s what is necessary to get a deal through.’
EVEN on a day when so much was breaking, word on Wednesday evening that Ruth Davidson was about to stand down as Scottish Tory leader stunned many.
But it was no shock to those close to her and it had nothing to do with the prorogation of Parliament or even Boris Johnson, whom Davidson has never liked or rated.
Eight years is a long time to lead any political party. No job in politics is as corrosive and soul destroying as being principal leader of the opposition and, having taken six months out to enjoy motherhood, Miss Davidson returned to the battlefront in May to find her zest for it had gone.
Her departure is a shattering blow for the Scottish Conservatives – and for politics in the whole of Britain. Feisty, funny and articulate, she hit her stride in the 2014 independence referendum, standing out amidst such grey personalities as Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Danny Alexander as a rose amongst thorns.
She connected with women, with young people, with the camera. She flung herself into the battle for the Union like a whirling little tornado. Others harangued and orated; she sang with rhetoric, fresh, vivid, feisty and most un-Tory.
The referendum – and the triumph of Better Together – made Ruth Davidson. She had found her great cause, the Union, and thereafter rode it time and again into battle, as Scottish Labour collapsed like a chocolate teapot and the Nationalist leadership fell to the brittle, readily unsettled Nicola Sturgeon.
As one observer joked, subsequent Scottish polls saw the Tories bounding towards the sound of gunfire with the Ruth, the whole Ruth and nothing but the Ruth.
Ability
Her name and her face filled leaflets, posters, fliers. Her merriment seemed to be everywhere. She has two qualities desperately rare in professional politics – an intense interest in people, what you think and what she might learn from you, and a delicious ability to laugh at herself.
Pressed by No 10’s director of communications Craig Oliver to appear alongside Labour’s Angela Eagle in a televised debate near the EU referendum, she asked him solemnly if two flat-topped, shovel-faced lesbians was really the image he wanted to project.
On another occasion, accepting some award, Davidson cracked this was, honestly, her proudest moment ‘since coming second in a Kim Jong-un lookalike competition’.
We loved her for it – and the results speak for themselves. To widespread incredulity, her party marmalised Labour at the 2016 Holyrood election to become the chief opposition.
A year later, the Scottish Tories ran away with 276 seats in Scotland’s local elections: in 2012, it had been an underwhelming 112. Weeks after that – after years of returning one lonely MP for as long as anyone can remember – her whirlwind campaign secured 13 seats at Westminster.
It was their best general election since distant 1983 and, but for it, we too readily forget that the Tories would have been out of government.
Yet, significantly, of all her glories the one Davidson yesterday chose to dwell on was her part, in 2014, in saving the Union. She had that summer the privilege of a ‘front seat’ as history was being made, she assured reporters.
In turn, it made her. And the most grievous worry for her party is not just how the momentum she won for the Scottish Tories can be maintained.
It is how few politicians of any standing, anywhere, really now care about that Union. For Thatcher, Major, and even Tony Blair, it was instinctive and visceral. Cameron was unnervingly nonchalant, jeopardising it in one of the succession of essay-crisis referendums that finally did him in.
But, as was evident a few weeks ago, for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell it is but a bagatelle, a gaming chip amidst Parliamentary manoeuvres.
And, disturbingly, polling earlier this summer established the survival of Great Britain is no longer a priority for most Tory members in England and Wales. Scotland can skip off to the North Pole, as long as there is Brexit.
Worse, as someone yesterday wailed, there has been no succession planning and there is no obvious heir to the Davidson mantle.
The front-runners – Jackson Carlaw, Adam Tomkins and the perennial Murdo Fraser – are of the same worthy, tweedy cloth that for so many years presided complacently over Scottish Tory decline.
They are also Remainers, putting them at odds with Boris Johnson, his Government and its immediate and central political objective – and ill-placed to exploit the obvious sweet spot in Scotland’s politics.
It cannot be stressed often enough that more Scots voted Leave in 2016 than voted SNP in June 2017. They included many habitual SNP voters, whom Sturgeon and her lieutenants have since seemed determined to alienate.
And results in both 2017 and at the recent European Parliament election suggests a fifth of those Nationalists have indeed now abandoned their old allegiance.
They backed, instead, Ruth Davidson and, more recently and for the most part, the Brexit Party – which will be a serious problem for the new Scottish Tory leader if, at the last, we are indeed cheated of our independence from the European Union.
Support
But a leader who believes in Brexit – as an exciting opportunity, not just as a crisis to be managed – could tap into that whole new reservoir of electoral support and entangle the SNP in knots as it strives simultaneously to embed us in the Continental union and wrest us immediately from the United Kingdom.
The most credible contenders, on that analysis, are largely Westminster MPs – especially as the mass of Tory MSPs enthusiastically backed Jeremy Hunt for the national leadership.
Some – like the endearing but ridiculous Ross Thomson – we can at once discount.
Scottish Secretary Alister Jack is a convinced and cheerful Leaver; but the optics of his Downton Abbey lifestyle are unfortunate. Douglas Ross, who felled SNP grandee Angus Robertson in Moray two years ago, has earthy authenticity and the interesting hinterland of professional football. Within Holyrood, Oliver Mundell, MSP for Dumfriesshire, is a most able man and a persuasive Brexiteer, but he is still only 30.
Margaret Mitchell and Michelle Ballantyne – the one an MSP since 2003; the other a trained nurse and mother of six – have potential, but scant name recognition.
Adam Tomkins, right now, may be the strongest contender, his Remain allegiance apart – 50, a sometime Professor of Public Law, a fullthroated Unionist and of keen appetite for a scrap. But his cheerful allegiance to Rangers has already divided the nation, not least after that imprudent Tweet two weeks ago, ‘Great to be back at Ibrox today. Always good to see a team wearing green thumped 6-1…’
In Downing Street, the manner of Davidson’s going must have won many sighs of relief: she made not the slightest effort to take the Prime Minister down with her and spoke graciously of him. But in wider Britain, the end of her political career – few expect Davidson to stand for Edinburgh Central re-election in 2021 – will be widely regretted.
She embodied a new sort of Conservativism, one of optimism, one that spoke human – and with a cut-through to very many who, hitherto, would never have dreamed of voting Tory. It was not absurd, at her apogee, to imagine her Prime Minister.
She brought to her Scottish brethren, so long-demoralised, flair, success – and seats – few would have credited.
With a new captain on the bridge, deftly exploiting brisk new winds and Britain’s coming independence – with Scottish Labour’s gurgling death-rattle and an SNP administration tired, stale and incompetent – they have that platform on which to build.
Sorely as their queen will be missed, there are still glittering possibilities for the Scottish Tories.