From sitting on Saddam’s throne to the fateful night in Strangers’
FOR A time, Ross Thomson looked like the ideological heir to the Thatcherite and Eurosceptic tendencies within Scottish Toryism.
The party north of the Border has a reputation as a broadly One Nation outfit, where right-wing views are a minority pursuit. Although that is something of a caricature, there is some truth to it: Scottish Tories prefer to stick to the middle of the road.
Thomson, a former councillor in Aberdeen, was first elected to Holyrood in 2016 and veered the steering wheel to the Right almost immediately.
He was an enthusiastic backer of Brexit, a position uncommon not only in his own parliamentary group but across the chamber.
The decision did not sit well with some of his new colleagues, who reasoned that the former retail trainer had been elected off the back of Ruth Davidson’s star power and should fall into line with her Remain stance, not a position Davidson herself tried to impose. She recognised the vitality of parties with broad internal spectrums.
His youth and sexuality made Thomson popular among activists keen to change perceptions of the party as the domain of ‘blue-rinse matrons’, while his forthright views were popular among the grassroots. He was, in Tory parlance, ‘sound’.
Although starting to establish himself as a rising star, his transfer to Westminster after barely a year at Holyrood struck some as precipitous. In the 2017 election which saw the Tories reclaim swathes of the North East from the SNP, Thomson claimed as his scalp Callum McCaig, turning a 7,000 Nationalist majority into an almost-5,000 Tory advantage. Now the SNP and Labour, the second and third-placed parties in the seat, will try to see off the Conservatives’ replacement candidate. National polls would seem to favour Nicola Sturgeon’s party.
Newly arrived at Westminster, Thomson staked out his territory there both as a Brexiteer and as more of a Tory than a Scottish Tory. Nothing underscored this more than his early and enthusiastic backing of Boris Johnson for the party leadership. Even when fellow Tories and commentators scoffed at the idea of the blundering former foreign secretary seizing the crown from Theresa May, Thomson persisted in his confident prediction that it would happen.
Thomson’s support for Johnson was cheerleading in everything except the pom-poms and opponents branded him the future PM’s ‘poodle’. While the term carried an unpleasant undertone it was impossible to deny that his devotion was fierce and unquestioning. There are members of the Prime Minister’s family – quite a few, as it happens – who hold him in less affection.
NOR was his political judgment exactly pristine. During a 2018 visit to Iraq, he posted a series of pictures to social media that showed him grinning on Saddam Hussein’s former throne and posing before the Swords of Qadisiyah, a triumphalist monument the dictator had commissioned in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War.
However, it was the events in the Strangers’ Bar – the House of Commons watering hole popular with MPs and parliamentary staffers – that led to Thomson’s resignation from political life.
He denied allegations of misconduct but yesterday a statement posted to Twitter announced he was stepping down as a Conservative candidate in the General Election. Retaining Aberdeen South, which voted 68 per cent Remain, was not a likely prospect anyway.
Thomson’s fleeting time in office did not produce the next generation of Tory star his fellow rightwingers had hoped for. It did, however, give that tribe an unapologetic articulator of their core beliefs.
Nonetheless, if the SNP gains Aberdeen South, it will make the Tories’ task of cobbling together a majority – and using it to deliver the Brexit Thomson campaigned for – all the more difficult.