All is not well within the Conservative party north of the border this morning. Counting the votes hasn’t even started yet but already the Scottish Tories have pre-emptively begun deciding who’s to blame for the looming electoral losses. Senior figures within the party expect ‘heavy losses’ and are preparing to slip into third place: unnamed sources are going around suggesting Boris is to blame, with unionist voters refusing to turn out in protest against the No. 10 lockdown parties.
Not all within the Scottish party are content to play this game. Former MSP Adam Tomkins, a widely-respected academic who stood down from Holyrood last May, has pointed out that the Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross must share in the blame too. Ross originally submitted a letter of no confidence in Johnson earlier this year, before then withdrawing it weeks later. Enraged by a briefing which claimed ‘Douglas is going nowhere, he is not resigning’ and that ‘Voters have sent a message to Boris, not Douglas,’ Tomkins tweeted that:
I’m sorry but this is nonsense. Whatever today’s results show Douglas Ross owns this, not Boris. It was Douglas who u-turned, Douglas who flipped, and Douglas who backed the PM. He and his team need to own the consequences, not pass the buck.
A brutal day beckons for Ross, whose leadership has seen the Conservatives reverse nearly a decade of hard-fought electoral gains. By flip-flipping over Boris’s leadership, Ross might ironically have doomed his own.
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