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LIKE A faded starlet spurned by the spotlight, Scotland is struggling to pull in the crowds this election season. We got used to being the centre of attention in the 2014 independence referendum and again in 2015 when it looked like Britain was heading for a hung parliament with the SNP as kingmakers.
Last May, political hacks again decamped north of the border to witness the improbable Tory surge that installed Ruth Davidson as the leader of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament and consigned Labour to third place.
Now Brexit, largely an English phenomenon, has top billing and Scotland can hardly get a look in. Yet, the plotline developing in Edinburgh is no less gripping than in previous votes.
The SNP in 2017 is no longer the electoral behemoth that won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Commons seats in 2015.
Polls indicate it will retain most of them but the party suddenly has a fight on its hands. Scotland’s 62 per cent Remain vote was expected to renew calls for a second referendum on splitting from England, yet when SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon tried to
capitalise on anti-Brexit feeling her efforts fell flat. Worse, support for independence began to slip below 2014 levels.
Instrumental in this was Theresa May’s arrival in Downing Street. The Nationalists assumed they could easily demagogue the Tory Prime Minister as another Margaret Thatcher; in fact, Scots decided they rather liked the vicar’s daughter and her brand of common sense.
They weren’t happy about Brexit but they were resigned to it and wanted Ms Sturgeon to get on with the day job of running Scotland’s crisis-ridden schools and health service. Finally, Ms Sturgeon gambled that formally demanding “Indyref 2” would swing national sentiment behind her. Humiliatingly, Mrs May said no and most Scots backed her stance. Ms Sturgeon still inspires evangelical fervour in her flag-waving followers, but in the minds
Ruth Davidson, Jackson Carlaw, Kirsten Oswald, Kezia Dugdale of floating voters she has become yet another politician.
Ruth Davidson has undergone the reverse phenomenon. The Tory leader is a happy warrior for Scotland’s Unionists — a clip of her snapping “sit down” at Ms Sturgeon during a heated debate in March went viral — and she has won over swathes of Labour voters.
Symbolic is the seat of East Renfrewshire, the Glasgow constituency that is home to much of Scotland’s Jewish population. The Scottish Tories’ deputy leader Jackson Carlaw took the Scottish Parliament seat there from Labour in the 2016 Holyrood election, held amid Ken Livingstone’s outbursts on Hitler and Zionism. Mr Carlaw is a