Andrew Bowie: We’ve got a long way to go to win back trust

If you thought going from government minister to opposition would have forced Andrew Bowie to slow down, you’d be mistaken.

The West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine MP is still going full speed, despite not having responsibility for nuclear power any more. Between his shadow Scottish secretary role and his acting shadow energy secretary role (while Claire Coutinho is on maternity leave – he’ll return to shadow energy security minister when she’s back), Bowie has a lot in his plate. Maybe that’s why he talks a mile a minute.

Meeting in Portcullis House’s central atrium – where he prefers to be due to the buzz of the place – eight months after his party was chucked out of Downing Street, I ask how that shift has been.

“The adjustment is huge. Nobody really prepares you for what it is like to leave government and go into opposition, especially when you’re in a ministerial role. You get used to having that support network around you within the department. Thousands of civil servants, private secretaries, a diary secretary, a driver, all organising your life from the crack of dawn until well past dusk. That is a big change.

“And also overnight that you lose all influence or ability to actually change anything. You become much more reactive to events, in fact almost entirely reactive to events and what the government is doing, having to respond to that rather than be proactive and enabling the change yourself. So that’s a big change also.”

Nobody can out-Farage Farage, so why bother?

The scale of defeat suffered by his party, dropping from 365 seats to just 121, was tectonic. Bowie suggests he and his colleagues are working “far harder, probably, than most other official oppositions have had to”. And he’s got a point. To put the size of his group into perspective, there are currently 119 ministers in the UK Government.

I wonder if one silver lining is that he gets to spend more time at home with his wife, Madeleine, and two-and-a-half year old daughter, Emily. “When you’re in opposition, you’re doing so much more by yourself, which is maybe as it should be, but it is time consuming and I do spend more days in Westminster now than I did when I was a minister,” he says. “What has gone is the travel or the having to spend weekends away, which was the case when I was a minister, so at least I’m getting to spend most of my weekends with my daughter.”

For the Scottish Conservatives, that night in July turned out to be not as bad as it could have been. Although the party’s share of the vote in Scotland halved, it managed to hold on to all bar one seat. Bowie recalls: “When that exit poll drops, you know pretty much from that point on what the rest of the night is going to look like and whether or not you’re going to be returned. It could be a stomach through the floor moment or it could be a moment of great elation. I’ve had both in my time, ironically in almost the complete opposite to most of my colleagues.

“In 2019, with the exit poll, it looked like the SNP had wiped the floor. In fact, they almost did wipe the floor in Scotland and I was sure that on the numbers that we were seeing, I was for the chop. This time, a dreadful exit poll UK-wide for the Conservative Party, most of my friends and colleagues who are no longer here knew at that moment they were no longer going to be MPs. I looked at that and saw the SNP numbers and thought ‘oh, it should be alright’.”

However, Bowie acknowledges the reason he’s still an MP is more to do the SNP’s vote plummeting. “I thought it was due to the sheer personal magnetism of all of our candidates in the seats that we were returned!

“No, look, of course the reason that myself and David Mundell and John Lamont are here with increased majorities is – not entirely, but in large part – to do with the fact that the SNP vote collapsed. That’s absolutely fair. Our vote collapsed 12 per cent in Scotland last year, that’s far too low for a party that seeks to be a national party of government with representation in the whole country.”

That’s why he’s so keen to be part of the rebuild. He was one of the earliest backers of Kemi Badenoch to become the leader, and he also put his support behind Russell Findlay in Scotland. He says both candidates were “clearly the best for each role”, and praises their shared “propensity to get stuck in and not walk away from a fight – or some would say seek out a fight”.

He continues: “In terms of rebuilding, we need to acknowledge [the general election] was the worst defeat that we’ve ever suffered in the entire history of the Conservative Party, and this is one of the oldest political parties in the world. It’s going to take time for us to rebuild to the point that we are capable of going into government.

There has been a realignment in politics, that’s quite clear, and we in the Conservative Party have to respond to that

“We need to take the time to do the hard yards of deep and meaningful work on policies so that when the British people look to who they want to form the next government, we’ve got a credible alternative for them… We’re going to spend the next year taking time to get the policies right, working with stakeholders, third party organisations, experts in the field of all the different portfolio areas so that we can come together, answering some of the biggest questions that we face as a country so that we can gain the trust and actually have the British people give us a listening ear once again, because frankly they don’t want to hear from us right now. They don’t trust us and we’ve got a long way to go to win back the trust, and hopefully the support, of the British people.”

The Scottish Parliament election next year means the test of whether this has worked is coming sooner for Findlay than Badenoch. But the two separate election cycles pose problems for both the Conservatives and Labour, he says.

“That will come at a very bad time, I think, for Labour, given it’s going to be at the midpoint of this parliament, when any government in history wants to get the unpopular stuff done. But it’s also going to come at a challenging time for us because we will not yet be at the stage where we will be coming to the general election, where we will have announced our policies and our position on a whole host of different areas.

“Of course, this is a devolved election, fought on devolved issues, but there are areas that do crossover UK-wide, so there is a challenge there, don’t get me wrong. In terms of how I think we’re going to perform in 2026, we have confounded expectations many times in the past, and I’m sure we will again.”

I ask whether he believes Labour is learning the hard lesson of how tricky it is to balance governing and trust. “I think what is clear is that Labour have lost the trust of that coalition of support they had in the last election,” Bowie says.

“But they’ve got time to get it right and they’ve got time to change course. We need to be very careful not to fall into the trap of being complacent. Just because the public are out of love with Labour, it doesn’t mean they come rushing back to us. That is not the case. All the polls, even though we should just take them with a pinch of salt, demonstrate that right now there is disenchantment with politics as a whole, especially the established political parties in this country.

“That is probably why we’re seeing so many people voicing support for Reform at the minute, because it’s ‘a pox on all your houses’, you know, ‘anybody but the above’ really is what people are saying. And that’s what Nigel Farage is offering. Whether that will hold for them up until the next election, that remains to be seen.”

It’s interesting that Bowie is the first to mention Reform, perhaps an insight into how much upset the party is causing. It achieved the third-highest vote share last summer, had leapfrogged the Conservatives in the polls by the end of last year, and is now even outperforming Labour in some recent surveys. So how does a centre-right party like the Conservatives respond to a challenge from the right?

“By being authentic and true to ourselves, by not trying to out-Reform Reform, by not trying to appeal to the common denominator in terms of chasing the voter,” Bowie replies. “We need to stick true to who we are as Conservatives, offer a pragmatic, sensible, liberal, Conservative vision of what the future can be in Scotland, and indeed the UK.

[Reform] seem to be doing a good job of imploding all by themselves

“You need a broad coalition of support from across the country, from across age groups, demographics, and that is what we have to be focused on doing. And we’re not going to achieve that, we’re not going to get that broad voter base, if we are purely focused on countering, responding to and aping Nigel Farage at every available opportunity, because nobody can out-Farage Farage, so why bother?”

We are chatting not long after the high-profile row between Farage and Rupert Lowe. I ask if he’s feeling a bit of schadenfreude. “I couldn’t possibly comment. I mean, matters inside the Reform party are for the Reform party, and I wouldn’t want to wade into that argument. They seem to be doing a good job of imploding all by themselves.”

He tells me that, despite the rumours, his party has not been approached by Lowe about crossing the floor. Would they take him if he did?

“It’s not for me to answer that question, but as I said, he hasn’t got a history of being Conservative so I think we’d have to question whether or not he truly was. And obviously there have been some serious allegations levelled at him and that has to be answered and clear first, before any discussion could take place moving forward.”

Critical as he may be of Reform, there have been some suggestions his party is moving to the right to stem the flow of people leaving. Bowie says it is simply “not true” that his party are mimicking Reform. “Look deeper and you’ll see that’s not the case. We aren’t. There has been a realignment in politics, that’s quite clear, and we in the Conservative Party have to respond to that.”

One policy area where the Conservatives do seem to be taking notes from Reform, though, is net zero. Badenoch last month said the 2050 target was “impossible”. That target was set by the Conservative government in 2019, when Bowie was parliamentary private secretary to then prime minister Theresa May. He now describes it as a mistake.

The policy of this government towards the North Sea drives me, as you can probably tell, absolutely bananas

“Look, nobody’s saying that net zero was a mistake. Net zero in the round was the eminently sensible thing to do. We need to decarbonise and we need to have an ambitious target to aim for,” Bowie says. But, he argues, the problem is there has been no discussion on how that target will be reached six years on. He blames that on Brexit and then the pandemic taking up government time.

It’s resulted, he says, in policies being driven through that are “really damaging… for investment, jobs, manufacturing, heavy industry”. “Yes, of course we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Yes, of course that means investing in new technologies. But we need to do so in a way that’s sensible, pragmatic and actually delivers jobs and opportunities for the British people.”

This brings the discussion around to the North Sea, a topic that Bowie is particularly sensitive to. In a debate about the offshore industry last month, he warned constituencies like his were facing “dole, baby, dole” – a play on the “drill, baby, drill” slogan popularised by US President Donald Trump.

Bowie is adamant that continuing to drill in the North Sea is compatible with net zero ambitions. He highlights that the Conservative government continued to award exploration and drilling licences at the same time it oversaw the building of some of the largest offshore windfarms in the world.

“You can do both. What I do not understand is Ed Miliband’s policy of accelerating – a wilful acceleration of – the decline of the North Sea, while still acknowledging we’re going to be relying on gas for a large part of the next 20 to 30 years for our energy needs,” he says.

And it means the UK is “bottom of the list” for energy companies looking to invest. “The policy of this government towards the North Sea drives me, as you can probably tell, absolutely bananas, because it just makes no sense, it’s incoherent and it’s incompetent. It’s costing jobs and it’s not delivering any reduction in carbon emissions because we’re increasing them by importing gas from overseas.”

What the North Sea and wider energy sector needs, he says, is “fiscal stability”. And while he welcomes the UK Government’s consultation on a post-2030 framework, he argues that what it is doing now is “destroying that industry”. “By coming in and almost on day one extending the energy profits levy, getting rid of most of the investment allowances, and then not issuing any new licences, preventing operation and drilling, what signal does that send to the investor community? It says we’re closed for business.”

The North Sea is one of the few areas his party and the SNP share some common ground. And Bowie speaks warmly of several of the SNP MPs, particularly Westminster leader Stephen Flynn. “We do work together locally on issues of importance to our region, and actually on quite a few issues of importance to Scotland… We obviously have huge disagreements on other areas of policy, not least obviously the constitution. But on areas where we can work together, we should, and I think we do. And I think that’s to the betterment of the country and indeed the betterment of both of our parties.”

I wonder if that means he’ll miss Flynn if he does end up leaving the Commons for Holyrood next year. “Yes, actually, I will… He has contributed to the debate here very positively, he has been an active participant in significant debates, and he has made his voice and the voice of his party heard. And he has been a prominent campaigner on issues that he believes passionately in. I think he’s the sort of person that we should have in the House of Commons.”

We wrap up our chat on another note of consensus: Keir Starmer’s handling of Ukraine. “Keir Starmer has been in the right place and has done the right thing when it comes to Ukraine. He has got the support of the opposition when it comes to increasing defence spending, pulling our allies on the continent and around the world together, demonstrating our continued support for Ukraine, and indeed, tackling the issues that are thrown up on a near daily basis by Donald Trump being in the White House. I think it’s really important for the outside world to see that on issues like Ukraine, the United Kingdom does stand as one.”