Turning blue: Prospects for the Scottish Conservatives

David Mundell is clearly suspicious of his opponents. “I don’t put it past the SNP if we won five seats to go and rent four more pandas,” joked the Conservative candidate for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale in conversation with Holyrood a few weeks ago. 

For the past decade, Mundell has been the Conservative’s sole Westminster representative north of the border. If latest constituency polling materialises on 7 May, Mundell will relinquish that mantle, potentially for it to be taken over by colleague John Lamont, who has been tipped to edge out Lib Dem Michael Moore in the neighbouring seat of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk.

Their leader, Ruth Davidson, has declared with certainty that the party will exceed the 412,855 votes picked up in 2010. “But in some ways I can work as hard as I can, my candidates can work as hard as they can, they can put out all the positive messages, but how those votes break down into seats is very much in the lap of the electorate, not in the lap of the campaign organisers,” said Davidson at one of her theatrical press calls, this one culminating in her serving up ice cream and juggling for the assembled photographers. 

Indeed, Davidson, while hailing Mundell as a “phenomenally hard-working MP”, has stopped short on more than one occasion of saying she is confident the 52-year-old will be returned. Mundell, though declaring he is “confident that we will have Conservative MPs from Scotland” after this election – his use of the plural perhaps telling – has likewise been reticent to make such a statement. “I’m used to fighting hard for the seat,” he told Holyrood.

Conscious of the very real prospect that a Conservative-led government could continue at Westminster without a single MP north of the border, senior party figures have, unsurprisingly, sought to underline their vote share – one in six in 2010 – as a much more favourable barometer of popularity. “Clearly, there is a basis for support for the Conservatives in Scotland,” said Mundell as he, like his leader, has railed against tactical voting. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the most unwinnable seat in Scotland, it’s important that you register that vote and demonstrate the body of people who don’t support a left-wing consensus with two parties who are trying to out-left each other,” he added. 
 
In March, Adam Tomkins, one of two Scottish Conservative representatives on the Smith Commission, suggested David Cameron could offer “devo max” – now often coined by the language of full fiscal autonomy – as a means to appease the SNP, though he told Holyrood “that boat has sailed” after the two parties ruled out doing business with one another. “There are distant drumbeats in the Conservative Party [that] the way of rescuing or saving or securing the Union from here is by embracing a fully federal model,” expanded the John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow. 

Party policy at present, though – one that Tomkins stressed has his full support – is to deliver on the package of further powers agreed following last September’s referendum as well as settlements for each of the other three nations, such as ‘English votes for English laws’. “If the SNP hold the balance of power in the new House of Commons then that might – I’m not saying it will, I’m absolutely not saying it will – but that might lead to different political considerations, in the same way that it did 100 years ago when [Charles] Parnell held the balance of power in the House of Commons,” he added.

As far as Davidson’s leadership is concerned, the true test is yet to emerge, according to Dr Alan Convery, lecturer in politics at the University of Edinburgh, whose research centres on the Conservatives. She has, via the Strathclyde Commission, decisively positioned the party as being in favour of more powers, while also offering a “modern Conservative” image for the party. There is, however, still a need to realise that a moderate centre-right party on a Scottish political spectrum will look and feel a lot different from a moderate centre-right party in the south-east of England, argued Convery.

“I think the real test of that will be the 2016 Holyrood elections. If you look at what the Welsh Conservatives have done in terms of really thinking about, ‘where should we place ourselves in Wales?’ rather than ‘where do we place ourselves in the UK?’ and then matching that to Scotland, it’s not something the Conservative Party in Scotland has done so far. They’ve tended to stick quite closely to the UK party line [and] they’ve tended to recycle policies from the 1990s. The real test of that third strand of her leadership will be whether they really refresh the policies and where they place themselves on a spectrum next year.”

A fall in vote share or in the number of MSPs next May could see the kind of conversations previously advocated by Murdo Fraser of a new centre-right party in Scotland resurface, acknowledges Convery. Mundell seemed far less easily persuaded. “I think there is a centre right party in Scotland – it’s the Scottish Conservative Party and Ruth Davidson has demonstrated what can be achieved by delivering a centre-right message which is tailored to Scottish needs. 

“I see no space for a new party. What I see is space for people who are beginning to understand that actually they are Conservative, they have conservative views, conservative values [and] they want the United Kingdom to stay together. I think the opportunity is there for those people to migrate to the Scottish Conservative Party whatever happens in the referendum.” 

Referendum? “Whatever happens in the General Election, sorry. Time warp.”