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The unlikely Tory
She’s a working-class Scot, she’s gay, she’s anti-Brexit and pro-immigration, and she tells Trump where to get off. So what is Ruth Davidson doing in (and to) the Conservative Party? James Kirkup finds out
James Kirkup meets Ruth Davidson, the straight-talking, buffalo-riding, Trump-bashing Scottish Conservative leader who’s being tipped for Number 10
Ruth Davidson shouldn’t be here. By any traditional understandi ng of politics, she shouldn’t even have a political career, never mind one that’s seen her achieve enough by the age of 38 to be a serious player in the Conservative Party, viewed by serious people at Westminster as a potential future prime minister.
She should also, by rights, probably be dead, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
First the politics. Davidson is the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the party that finished second in elections to the Scottish Parliament last May. Second behind the Scottish National Party, but ahead of Labour. Even in the age of political earthquakes, that was a remarkable result: hatred of the Conservatives runs deep in Scotland, the country of Keir Hardie, Red Clydeside and Gordon Brown.
A month later, she marched into the biggest event of the EU referendum campaign, speaking for the Remain side in a live debate at Wembley, where she put a dent in Boris Johnson’s adamantine confidence, telling him very firmly indeed: ‘That is not good enough.’
In early 2017, Davidson has several roles. Officially, she’s leader of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament, no small job given that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has much of Scotland’s media onside and is talking about using Brexit as reason for another independence referendum.
Unofficially, Davidson is also a spokesperson for a strand of Tory thinking not much in fashion these days: a supporter of EU membership and a passionate advocate of foreign aid, she talks a lot about poverty and describes herself as a ‘John Major Tory’. Sir John, of course, being the man who 20 years ago led her party to its worst election defeat of modern times, including the loss of every one of its Scottish seats: ‘I love him,’ she says gleefully.
Oh, and she’s planning a wedding, too, with her partner Jennifer Wilson; Davidson is the most senior gay politician in Britain.
That’s the CV, but what about the person? ‘I am a fairly open book. I’m 38, I moved around in Scotland a bit as a child, went to my local comprehensive in Fife, went to uni, got a job as a journalist, worked my way up from local papers to BBC radio, and decided that, much as it was an honour to ask questions, I was arrogant enough to think there was something I could do to help things in Scotland.’
The ability to show humour without becoming a comical figure is at the heart of Davidson’s political success. She made her name with a series of borderline silly photo ops, including riding a buffalo and straddling the gun barrel of a British Army tank. Borderline silly, but effective: such stunts won her and her party some much-needed attention from Scots who had got used to ignoring the Tories entirely.
Her parents were ‘working-class people from Glasgow’ who grew up on council estates there but left the city and later bought their own home. Her father was a manager for a textile firm in the Borders, before the family moved to Fife. ‘They are the kind of doughty Scottish Presbyterians who believe in doing your bit, washing the step when it’s your turn, working hard. They vote Conservative, but we never had conversations in the house about politics. It wasn’t like Ed Miliband’s house, a salon.’
The move to Fife was almost the end of the story. Shortly after arriving there, at the age of five, Davidson was run over by a truck right outside the family’s house. ‘It broke my leg, broke my pelvis, crushed my femoral artery. I was in hospital for a very long time. It was 50-50 that I would live, and a worse chance that we would save the leg. We managed to do both,’ she says cheerily.
Davidson says most things cheerily. She laughs easily and often, even when she’s deadly serious. ‘When I went back to school, I was the only kid on a Zimmer. I still have quite extensive scarring on my leg, my back, my stomach. But you know’ – a chuckle – ‘you bounce back. By the time I finished primary school I was playing football for the boys’ team.’
Her recollection of the accident is cloudy (‘I have a faint memory of being on the tarmac and someone putting a blanket over me, but I wasn’t able to open my eyes’), but she is clear that credit for her ability to recover goes to her parents.
‘Looking back, the strength my parents had afterwards, to allow me to play football, to climb trees; to not wrap me in cotton wool – I really take my hat off to them.’
Did that experience shape her? ‘I don’t know if I was formed by that, or if the two things just happen to coexist with no causal link. I am cussed, I am dogged. Just because something is hard, just because something hurts, doesn’t
‘This primal scream of people who feel remote from politics is about the feeling that there is so much artif ice, that politicians never answer the question’
mean you don’t do it. I’m quite good at forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do or I’m scared of, but I’ve never considered [the accident] to be the defining event of my life.’
It certainly didn’t leave her with a surfeit of caution. She has, she says happily, ‘a very cavalier attitude to personal safety’, demonstrated during a rather abortive career in the Territorial Army: during an entry test for Sandhurst, she jumped through a window and fell badly.
‘Twenty years to the day, almost, after that accident, I found myself flat on my back in Salisbury hospital, having broken my back in three places.’ Davidson relates this story with delighted laughter, adding that she was back at work, with a neck and back brace, two weeks later, having ‘begged’ her doctor to let her return: ‘I’d rather be sore at work than depressed at home. I don’t like being idle.’
While she has never wanted for physical courage, personal confidence came much later.
Dav idson went to t he Universit y of Edinburgh to study literature at 17. ‘I found it really tough,’ she says of an institution that she describes (accurately – I was there at the same time, though we didn’t meet) as dominated by the self-assured children of the English middle class.
‘There are these people who are 20, 21, have had a gap year in Tanzania, who have this sheen, this brio, this impenetrable confidence that their entire life is mapped out for them; that they are going to end up married, in the Home Counties, with a lovely wife called Tilly – he’s got a Mercedes, she’s got a Land Rover and they have a pony called Trumper for their daughters. It was intimidating, that level of self-confidence.’
Yet here she is in politics, the ultimate confidence game, where success rests on your ability to walk into a room full of strangers and tell them: listen to me, follow me. She may be just 5ft 5in, but a big laugh and a big persona give her a much greater presence than her physical stature implies.
How did a shy wee lass afraid to speak in tutorials become the woman who stood toe-to-toe with Boris Johnson, perhaps the ultimate overconfident public-schoolboy, in front of millions of TV viewers and told him he was wrong?
For once, Davidson stops laughing. ‘It took me quite a long time to feel comfortable in my own skin. Coming out [as gay] was a big part of that.
‘Not to go into too much detail, but coming from where I came from, having such a strong faith background, I really str uggled. For a long time, I was trying to understand things about myself. It was something I tried to reject because I didn’t want it.’
There’s a pause. A woman who looks everyone in the eye is looking down, voice hesitant. ‘It took me a while to become accepting of myself… But in the end, that makes you stronger.’
As a political journalist, I’m not used to this sort of thing. Every self-respecting politician has a well-rehearsed tale of adversity and struggle, but this sounds real, and raw. So raw that I suggest we talk instead about politics, the politics of gay marriage.
My clumsy switch delights Davidson. ‘Oh, I talked about emotions. He doesn’t like it!’ she crows. It’s a remarkable moment, a leap from vulnerability to self-assurance that few politicians could manage with such a light touch.
She also challenges t he suggestion t hat politics is all about public performance. Belief matters more, she insists. ‘If you believe in people – that they make better decisions than the state, that the extension of that is to trust people with decisions, to leave more money in their pockets to make decisions about it themselves – then what I’ve done [in becoming a public figure] is entirely logical and conceivable.’
One of the things she believes in is gay marriage (‘I remember wanting it. I remember growing up thinking, that can never be for me; thinking it would never happen in my lifetime’), and she was a leading voice in the debate that led Scotland to change its law in 2014, the same year as England and Wales.
David Cameron’s push to allow same-sex couples full marriage rights alienated some of his Conservative colleagues, but if anything, Davidson enhanced her standing, by working rather harder to accommodate those who disagreed with her. ‘We were split 50-50; we had to manage it. We made sure we had people from both sides talking about the issue at all times. It matters to me that the other side
was articulated and not swept under the rug.’
It’s hardly the only issue on which she’s willing, even eager, to go against the grain.
We’re talking in a coffee shop at Westminster. Davidson often visits London for meetings with ministers, nominally about Scottish matters, but in reality much more wide-ranging: she’s recently been arguing in Whitehall for more British aid money to be spent on mine-clearance work in countries such as Kosovo.
Spending money on foreign aid is unpopular with many Conservatives today, but Davidson is unflinching in her support. ‘Even if there wasn’t a benefit for Britain – which there is – we should do it anyway, because we have a moral imperative to do so. I am happy to have that conversation with anyone in the party. I like debating, the clash of ideas. I think folk can tell when I talk about it, I mean it.’
She will also make the Conservative case for immigration, even if that puts her at odds with Theresa May. At the party conference last year, when the PM was arguing that immigration costs British jobs, and toying with making
‘It took me quite a long time to feel comfortable in my own skin. Coming out [as gay] was a big part of that’
companies publish details of their foreign workers, Davidson gave a speech suggesting that ‘picking up your life and moving halfway around the world to give your family a better life is one of the most Conservative things you can do’.
Few Tories today will openly contradict May, but Davidson shrugs off the difference of opinion: ‘I know that there were some eyebrows raised about the speech I gave, but I got a clap for it, because there were a lot of people who were uncomfortable about the narrative that was running at that conference.’
Gay marriage, foreign aid, liberal immigration rules – aren’t these the foibles of the fabled out-of-touch political elite, the policies forced on an electorate that responded by rejecting the ultimate elite project, the EU? Aren’t her views precisely the wrong ones for Brexit Britain?
Not so, she says. It matters less what a politician says than that they truly believe it.
‘This primal scream of people who feel remote from politics is about the feeling that there is so much artifice, that there is so much spin, that politicians never answer the question. One of the reasons I can hold views that may not be popular, may not necessarily have majority support in my party, but be respected for it, is that it is not positioning, it is genuine belief.’
She’s almost certainly right; some of her colleagues think so, anyway. Hence the persistent talk that her career will take her from Edinburgh to Westminster in due course. Like any sensible politician, of course, she bats away questions about her future.
‘Scotland has been pretty busy, of late. And it is my home. The job I am doing now is a heck of a lot bigger than being a backbench MP.
‘In a lovely way, it used to be that people would say, “When are you going to give up and become an MP?” Then it was, “When are you going to be a minister?” Now it’s, ‘When are you going to waltz down Downing Street into Number 10?” I don’t think any of those things are in my immediate future.’
Note that ‘immediate’. A 38-year-old can afford to be patient. Do you want to be prime minister? ‘No.’ Will you ever be prime minister? ‘No.’ Why? ‘Very few people are prime minister.’ True, but very few people are Conservatives in Scotland who make their party more popular than Labour.
‘The people who become prime minister have to have an ambition to do it. I’m not sure I am equipped with that ambition. And having regularly seen behind the door of Number 10, it looks like the most lonely job in the world.
‘ Polit ic s is more t han a job. It ca n be utterly consuming. You have to carve out a space for yourself, unless you are prepared to be consumed by it, and I am not prepared to be consumed by it. As much as anything else, you become less effective if you are.’
Many politicians who achieve high office at a young age are indeed consumed by politics, lacking what used to be called hinterland. Davidson doesn’t fit that bill. She’s managed to remain normal, or at least as normal as someone in her peculiar trade can be.
Ask who is her hero, and the answers are not polit ical: Att icus Finch f rom To Kill a Mockingbird, Thomas More (‘bit of an odd choice for a Presby terian, I suppose’), and Henry V as rendered by Shakespeare. She can reel off bits of the play from memory, but avoids the well-worn Harfleur and Agincourt speeches – ‘ Once more unto t he breach,’ and, ‘We happy few, we band of brothers’ – in favour of a softer, more revealing line.
Here, the King warns his troops not to loot or pillage after their victories in France. Kindness to former opponents best ser ves his ends: ‘When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.’
That’s a fair summary of her approach to politics. Ruth Davidson looks like someone who could one day play for a kingdom.