We need to talk about Boris...
She’s done an amazing job and has a bright vision. Yet she faces one big (blond) obstacle. Sorry, Ruth, but...
WHEN Ruth Davidson takes to the stage at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester later today, she will be welcomed as a heroine. Miss Davidson’s leadership of the Scottish Tories has been, by any standards, a success. She has transformed her party’s fortunes in Scotland, kickstarting a Conservative rebirth that few might have predicted just a few years ago.
That progress in Scotland has benefited the Tories across the UK – had Miss Davidson not delivered 12 new Scottish Conservative MPs in June, Prime Minister Theresa May’s General Election humiliation would have been so much worse than it was.
Many of those who will be in the audience when Miss Davidson speaks would very much like her to give up on Holyrood and seek election to Westminster: a poll last week found that a fifth of Tory Party members want the Scottish Conservative leader to succeed Mrs May as Prime Minister.
Those admirers are, I fear, to be disappointed.
The Scottish Conservative leader, having successfully taken her party ahead of Labour in last year’s Holyrood election, now wishes to end the First Ministership of Nicola Sturgeon.
This, you might think, will be a difficult task and you’d be right. But long-shot though election victory for the Scottish Tories in 2021 might be, Miss Davidson is ready to give it her all.
Miss Davidson is sensible to demand a greater share of the Union bounty for Scotland. It is time for a fairer division of the spoils of the UK. The Tories’ opponents are justified in complaining that successive Westminster governments have failed to spread the joy.
THE Scottish Tory leader, say friends, is acutely aware that political success – and the influence that comes with it – can be desperately shortlived and she intends to flex some muscle while she can. If her colleagues are wise, they will listen carefully.
Miss Davidson led the Scottish Conservatives to their best result in recent memory because she successfully positioned herself as a great champion of the UK. Voters who had rejected the SNP’s separation plans in 2014, and who feared further division and uncertainty caused by a second independence referendum, saw in Miss Davidson a stout defender of their interests.
But now that Indyref 2 is dead – killed by Miss Davidson’s success in June’s General Election – the Scottish Conservatives need a new approach to campaigning.
With a bold demand for a greater share of the fruits of the UK for Scotland, she might have found one that undermines the SNP’s relentless claims that the Union is skewed in favour of England (or Westminster, as Scottish Nationalists call it).
Miss Davidson will use her speech to make the case for the greater spread of civil service jobs and cultural bodies across the UK. She will argue that, despite two decades of devolution, London continues to dominate the nation. It is the sort of thing one might expect to hear from an SNP cabinet secretary rather than a staunch Unionist.
But, in addressing concerns that the UK has become too London-centric, Miss Davidson will reassert her commitment to Holyrood.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Miss Davidson’s speech will set her at odds with her colleagues at Westminster but it will certainly show that she is ready and willing to do things her own way, to be – whisper it – independent of the UK Tory Party.
There will have to be much more of this kind of thing if Miss Davidson is to build on her party’s success in recent elections. The fact is that, with the independence threat now silenced, she will find that close ‘union’ with Westminster Tories is not necessarily beneficial.
The same poll that found such enthusiasm for a Davidson premiership revealed that even more members of the Conservative Party would like to see Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson succeed Theresa May (who is scheduled for defenestration by colleagues in 2019, shortly after the UK leaves the EU).
A Johnson premiership would be very bad news indeed for Miss Davidson. She’s a modern, pro-European who has succeeded in persuading a substantial number of Scots that she is different from the sort of Tories they have rejected for decades. Mr Johnson, on the other hand, is an unpredictable egotist who personifies the sort of privileged upper-class Tory toff disdained by so many north of the Border. All of Miss Davidson’s good work in rebuilding her party could be undone by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. If Nicola Sturgeon enjoys taunting Miss Davidson the antics of Theresa May, then she would be in paroxysms of ecstasy if Mr Johnson were in Downing Street.
Can you imagine? Miss Davidson would stand up in Holyrood to demand Scottish Government action on this key issue or that and the First Minister could confidently avoid answering while pointing out that the UK was being led by a man who even the Scottish Tory leader would cross the road to avoid.
IT would be a mistake to underestimate Miss Davidson’s disdain for Mr Johnson. She considers him a political charlatan whose loyalties are to himself before anyone or anything else. One Scottish Tory told me ‘we would very much like Boris to fail again to become Prime Minister. If he could see his way clear to screwing up his next campaign as spectacularly as he screwed up his last one, that would be dandy’.
When Pro-EU Miss Davidson and Brexiteer Mr Johnson clashed during a televised debate in Wembley Arena during last year’s EU referendum campaign, it was evident that the Scottish Tory leader was entirely immune to the charms of the former Mayor of London. His Bertie Wooster schtick left her completely cold.
The prospect of Mr Johnson achieving the highest office in the land will, then, be an unpleasant distraction for Miss Davidson. She will, I think, reason that the greater his success, the greater the knock-on negative impact on the progress of the Scottish Tories.
After a couple of wobbly years, Miss Davidson has matured into one of the most capable politicians in the UK. She has earned the right to be discussed as a possible future Prime Minister (even if she doesn’t actually want the job).
But Ruth Davidson still has a way to go before she overtakes the SNP. And among the bumps in the road ahead of her, the largest is Boris Johnson.
She considers him to be a political charlatan