NOTHING BUT THE RUTH...
Gay, working-class and a woman, Ruth Davidson is the most unlikely Tory leader in the party’s history. But what is the next chapter for a remarkable politician whose singularity has been eclipsed only by her success, asks Alex Massie?
Alex Massie profiles Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson
In March 2016, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party assembled at Murrayfield Stadium for its annual spring conference. It seemed an appropriate venue; a ground filled with the memory of historic victories but that, more recently, had become a place of near-constant pain. But just as the national rugby team seemed on the brink of a revival, so the Scottish Tories, so long an afterthought when they weren’t just a joke, had reasons to be cheerful.
An election was in the offing and addressing the largely grey-haired and often red-trousered faithful, David Cameron lavished praised on the party’s ‘not-so-secret weapon’, a ‘formidable force in politics, our Sturgeon-slaying, Dugdale-defying, absolute star of a leader… Ruth Davidson’.
The striking aspect of this was that, at this point, Ruth Davidson had won very little. The 2015 Westminster election had
At university she over-compensated for shyness by trying to be the funniest person in the room
not gone well. Four years into Davidson’s leadership, the Tories won just 15% of the votes in an election dominated by the SNP. The nationalists might have lost the independence referendum war, but they seemed to be winning all the subsequent battles as they all but swept the country, winning 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies.
Politics changes quickly, however. Cameron is no more, his career undone by the Brexit referendum, and Theresa May, his successor, owes her place in Downing Street to the transformed fortunes of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party. To, in other words, Ruth Davidson. The Conservatives won 12 seats at last year’s Westminster election and party insiders regret that it could have been more but for the baleful cross-border influence of Mrs May’s hapless campaign. It was, they are clear, Ruth’s victory, not the Prime Minister’s. No wonder George Osborne, no friend of May admittedly, hailed the Scottish Tory leader as the election’s ‘heroine’.
Now Davidson is a rare creature indeed: a politician with a UK-wide profile who has never sat in the House of Commons. How far will she go? And, more pertinently, how far does she want to go? Will she really succeed Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister? Could she even, as is now often suggested, one day lead the party at the UK level? Might she even become Prime Minister?
To answer that, we must look at where Davidson has come from. Like Nicola Sturgeon’s upbringing in Ayrshire, Davidson’s was not so much ordinary as typical. Like Sturgeon, voters can relate to Davidson even if they disagree with her. Davidson’s parents were – are – working-class Glaswegians who left school with few formal qualifications but were quietly upwardly mobile. Her father played for Partick Thistle FC and worked as a manager in a Borders mill before, after it closed, moving to Fife. Davidson grew up in a council house and was educated at Buckhaven High School, a school in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the Kingdom.
Certain moments in a life leave an impression, however. Aged five Davidson was run over by a truck outside the family home, breaking her leg, her pelvis and crushing her femoral artery. Months in hospital followed; on her discharge Davidson had to learn to walk again. To this day she has, she says, ‘squinty legs’.
Her parents prized effort as much as success. Coasting was frowned upon. Davidson has recalled receiving a ‘minibollocking’ for a school report in which she received an A in science but only a B for effort. Possessing ability imposed a duty to make the most of it. As some of her party colleagues have discovered to their cost, she deplores laziness.
Davidson took these lessons to Edinburgh University, where she read English. For the first time she was confronted by the ineffable confidence that was – and is – the defining characteristic of the university’s large population of privatelyeducated undergraduates. By her own admission, she sometimes tried too hard, over-compensating for shyness by making an effort to be the funniest person in the room.
These were growing years, however, during which, like many students, Davidson’s chief subject was discovering her own identity. That meant, she came to see, reconciling her emerging sexuality with her Christian faith. For a time, she told the BBC in 2015, she ‘didn’t want to be gay’ but ‘there comes a point at which you make a decision and that decision is either that you’re going to live a lie for the rest of your life, or you’re going to trust yourself, and that’s what I had to do’.
Davidson was active in the university debating society – she represented Edinburgh at the world debating championships – which satisfied her twin thirsts for argument and competition. She was a capable speaker, but not a dominant one. Certain traits evident then are still in evidence today, however. ‘If she felt she was being spoken down to, she wasn’t afraid to tell patronising debating pricks – i.e. men – to piss-off,’ recalls one contemporary. ‘Back then,’ she told Vogue earlier this year, ‘I didn’t realise the difference between knowledge and intelligence, or confidence and ability.’ It was a useful training ground for a life in politics.
If few of Davidson’s contemporaries imagined she might one day seek elected office, far less become the star she is today, many can draw a line from the Ruth they knew – combative, quickwitted, sharply human – and the Ruth they see today. ‘I still recognise the person I used to know when I see her on TV which, despite her success and [high] profile, is not something that can ever be taken for granted,’ says one.
A career in journalism followed, first with the local paper in Glenrothes, then at Radio Scotland. At the BBC, she ‘turned up looking like a student’, says one colleague. ‘I doubt she would have ever been a star; she lacked some vital quality on air,’ but ‘she was wellliked, hard-working and diligent. And ferociously sweary.’
“Davidson knows that policy is of secondary concern in Scottish politics
In time, Davidson’s enthusiasm for journalism waned and she took voluntary redundancy in 2009 to pursue a masters at Glasgow University. Journalism had been fun, but Davidson thirsted for something more active; something where she could be in the arena, making a contribution.
That same search had previously led to a spell in the Territorial Army. Davidson was accepted for a place at Sandhurst before breaking her back in training ended her prospects of a career in the military. However, the leitmotifs of determination in the face of adversity, coupled with a keen sense of duty, were apparent.
So when, following the parliamentary expenses scandal, David Cameron called for a new generation of political activists to get involved and change British politics, Davidson heard a call she felt she could, and should, answer. She joined the Conservative Party.
A spell working for then-leader Annabel Goldie followed before Davidson won a place on the Glasgow list of candidates and entered the Scottish Parliament in May 2011. Political lives turn on unearned fortune, however, and Davidson’s has been no exception. If the candidate above her on the Tory list had not been disqualified from standing, Davidson would not have been elected and the course of recent Scottish political history would, almost certainly, have been very different.
After six years as leader, Goldie stepped down. The frontrunner to succeed her, Perthshire MSP Murdo Fraser, had a radical proposal to reverse years of Tory decline: rip the party up and start again. The Tory brand was toxic, Fraser believed, and not likely to recover. A new name, a new brand, a new beginning was required. It was the euthanasia option.
In the absence of anyone else to challenge Fraser, Davidson became the safer choice; the continuity candidate. She accepted the Tories had a problem but thought Fraser’s idea of changing the name would not impress voters who would think the rebadged Tories were still the hated Tories. Change and renewal would have to come from within.
Nevertheless, it remains worth noting that 45% of those Tories who voted in the leadership contest agreed with Fraser’s Dignitas proposal. Davidson was the new leader, but, having been an MSP for just a few weeks, she was shockingly inexperienced. The safer option was still a mighty gamble. David Cameron once quipped he wanted to be Prime Minister because he thought he’d be good at it; Davidson became leader because someone had to do the job.
It was a steep learning curve. The early years were not always easy. If it helps to be lucky in your enemies, however, Davidson has been uncommonly fortunate. No couple could have done more to detoxify the Scottish Tories than Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. The independence referendum was a rallying call for Unionists spooked by the prospect of losing their country.
At long last, the Tories had a song to sing and one, moreover, in which they believed passionately. The days of apologising for being a Conservative were at an end, replaced by a muscular Unionism implacably opposed to the SNP’s separatist agenda.
Davidson is both a traditional Tory and a new kind of Conservative. The party’s tweedy image was never entirely fair – Michael Forsyth and Teddy Taylor, to name but two prominent examples, were scarcely scions of privilege – but it contained sufficient truth to be damaging. David McLetchie and Annabel Goldie, Davidson’s predecessors as party leader, were each transparently decent individuals but neither showed any ability to do much more than hold a steadily shrinking line.
Even so, it took Davidson years of toil to become an overnight success. In 2016’s Holyrood elections she capitalised on Labour’s shell-shocked weakness to argue that only the Conservatives could offer the ‘strong opposition’ the SNP, and the country, needed. The Tory campaign was unashamedly ‘presidential’, being not much more than Ruth, the whole Ruth and nothing but the Ruth. And it worked. The Tories increased their share of the vote by more than a third and more than doubled their representation. With 31 members, Davidson now led the largest opposition party.
To her critics, Davidson is a victory for style over substance, for the appearance of reform over its reality. She is a Tory in superficially new clothes but a traditional Tory behind the costume. This critique is not meritless. Davidson’s touchstones – the Kirk, the military, low taxes – are indeed standard Conservative concerns. But in politics, packaging matters. Besides, Davidson appreciated that policy is a second-order concern in modern Scottish politics. ‘She has great political judgement,’ says a colleague, but ‘it’s her fearlessness that really makes her so different’.
With politics realigned along constitutional lines, Davidson appreciated the opening this provided for full-throttled Unionism. Once you had asked voters to ‘Say No to a second referendum’ you didn’t need to say very much else. The more Nicola Sturgeon threatened another referendum, the more she hardened Unionist resolve.
Just as Sturgeon thought Brexit would outrage Scottish voters who had opted to Remain, so Davidson feared the First Minister’s analysis might be correct. Davidson had been a doughty campaigner for Remain – her appearance at a televised Wembley debate in which she lambasted Boris Johnson, telling viewers they deserved to hear ‘the truth’, was a coming out moment on the UK-wide stage – but she adroitly pivoted to warning Scottish voters that if Brexit was akin to ‘stubbing a toe’, independence would be like reacting to that by ‘shooting yourself in the foot’. So long as fear of independence trumps fear of Brexit, this policy may prove sustainable.
But to climb higher, which is to say that if Davidson is to satisfy her ambitions, she must do more than simply offer a Unionist bulwark against
“She plans to marry her fiancée Jen and the pair would like to have children, although Davidson is now 40
nationalist agitation. Even her parliamentary colleagues allow that policy development is Davidson’s short suit. She draws the outline of Tory policy but others must do much of the detailed work.
With the exception of education – where Tory ideas to give headteachers greater authority have in part been adopted by the SNP – much of the Tory policy canvas remains blank. Tory demands that the SNP put constitutional politics aside and ‘get on with the day job’ have been effective even as the Tories appreciate that their revival has benefitted from constitutional politics trumping other concerns.
‘The posh boys can’t be in charge forever,’ Davidson told me once, looking forward to a time when the Tory Party looked a little more blue collar than it did when the Cameron-Osborne partnership prevailed. No conversation about future Tory leadership takes place without her name being mentioned.
‘Her head was turned by the attention, of course it was,’ says one Tory MSP, but ‘she knows it’s not possible’. For the time being, there is no vacancy and even if there were the parliamentary manoeuvres required to get Davidson into the Commons would require considerable finesse. Besides, as one lobby veteran says: ‘There is a fair amount of that London arrogance that assumes she will inevitably dump the non-job at the pretend Parliament and head south to be the saviour at the earliest opportunity.’
For her part Davidson is adamant: ‘I know my job. My job is here.’ Realistically, she is tied to Holyrood until after the 2021 elections. As matters stand, that election looks like determining whether there will, or will not, be a second independence referendum. A fourth consecutive SNP victory would, if it produces a pro-independence majority, recreate the conditions that allowed the 2014 referendum to take place. Stopping that remains Davidson’s primary political responsibility.
Not all political victories look alike. It is difficult to imagine anyone else reviving the Scottish Tory Party in the manner Davidson has done even if it is also evident the deepest causes of that revival were not her doing. She has capitalised on the opportunity, however, and she does not actually need to become First Minister to win. Depriving the SNP of a majority would remove independence from the agenda until sometime after 2026 and liberate Davidson to pursue other interests.
Among those is family. She has a wedding to plan with her fiancée Jen Wilson, a marketing manager for a charity who Davidson met in the latter stages of the independence referendum. At some point the pair would like children, though Davidson, 40 now, is aware of the implications her age imposes.
Be that as it may, her duty to her party – and her cause – in Scotland is not yet exhausted. Beyond that, it remains possible fresh calls may be made on her commitment to service. This has been a surprising, even revelatory, story so far. It hasn’t ended yet.