The unexpectedly interesting struggle to lead the Scottish Tories (no-one is interested in the plight of the Scottish Liberal Democrats) rumbles on. In Manchester this week, Murdo Fraser’s supporters have done their best to look chipper but the fact is that his brave decision to suggest scrapping the party and starting again is beginning to look like a blunder. It is not that Fraser’s analysis is wrong, far from it, merely that asking the Tories to endorse a withering critique of their past and probable future failures is asking more of them than it is reasonable to expect.
If Murdo had run an orthodox campaign, his supporters say, he’d have won the leadership at a canter. If this is so, perhaps it would have been a good idea to run an orthodox campaign and use his victory as the mandate for a period of investigation and consultation to make the changes Fraser believes, not without reason, are required if right-of-centre politics is to have a better future in Scotand. Having won the leadership he could have challenged the party to “Back me or sack me”.
As it is he risks demonstrating that too much honesty is too much for an electorate that cannot handle uncomfortable truths. The change candidate looks – as Alan Cochrane reports – to be in trouble. If this was an election conducted using First Past the Post, Fraser might be in a stronger position. A plurality of members may yet agree with him but it is difficult to see him winning the support, even tempered support, of a majority. How many transfers will Fraser receive? The Alternative Vote cannot, one imagines, help his chances. Fraser must surely receive plenty of first preferences but it is hard to see how he can possibly or logically be many voters’ second choice.
Assuming – and this is no given – Fraser finishes in the top two on the first ballot, the question becomes whether he faces Ruth Davidson or Jackson Carlaw in the run-off. (We shall draw a compassionate veil over Margaret Mitchell’s “campaign”). Carlaw’s chances are, I fancy, under-rated; Davidson is the candidate with the greatest establishment support. Each is running as an anti-change candidate, alebit that Davidson’s campaign is predicated upon the notion that a young, Glaswegian, media-savvy lesbian leader will persuade Scots to give the Tories a second-look. Dare one suggest that, despite Ruth’s undoubted abilities, this is really cosmetic change of a kind that won’t convince anyone?
Again: the problem is not the leadership, but the party. It needs reform and reviving both in terms of its ideas and its organisation. Fraser’s idea – which has the merit of being the only idea in the race – is bold and should, if executed properly, be about more than just a change of name and badge. And yet he’s the candidate criticised for offering “superficial” change that will persuade no-one! But no other candidate offers anything other than “more of the Same, Only More So.” Since neither David McLetchie nor Annabel Goldie were hopeless leaders it is reasonable to suggest the problem is not the leadership but something rather bigger than that. Changing jockeys is not the solution; the Scottish Tories need a new horse.
Lord knows how it will all end but I begin to suspect, as do others, that Fraser has been too bold for his own good and that the party membership will prefer the appearance of minor change to any real and substantial change.
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