Back to Scotland, where Rishi Sunak is attending the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto launch in Edinburgh. Leaving the ongoing betting scandal in London, the Prime Minister walked into another controversy – about the football. Before Sunak launched into his speech he made a point of agreeing with Scottish Tory leader and linesman Douglas Ross that Scotland should have been awarded a penalty in last night’s Euros match. It’s certainly one way to get the Scots on side…
The issue of oil and gas a key dividing line for the Scottish Tories, Sunak highlighted how the positions of other parties on new licences could cost jobs. Slamming Sir Keir’s Labour lot, the PM claimed that Starmer’s army would ‘rather virtue signal to eco-zealots than protect jobs here at home’. Moving quickly onto the SNP, Sunak claimed John Swinney’s Nats were the ‘great pretenders’ of the North East, putting ‘radical environmentalism ahead of pragmatism’.
‘Voting Reform risks letting the nationalists off the hook. Voting Reform risks letting the SNP slide in through the back door.’
Then the Prime Minister turned his guns on Reform. Nigel Farage’s party has seen its support grow by three points over the last month in Scotland. While in the rest of the UK, the Tory message has been ‘vote Reform, get Labour’, today Sunak told his Scottish audience: ‘Voting Reform risks letting the nationalists off the hook. Voting Reform risks letting the SNP slide in through the back door.’
Getting personal, the PM nodded to Farage’s recent Telegraph piece – in which the Reform leader suggested the West helped provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ‘You all heard what Nigel Farage said about Ukraine. That plays into Putin’s hands,’ Sunak told the crowd.
Sunak’s comments follow recent YouGov polling that reveals that since the middle of May, support for Reform in Scotland has increased to seven per cent, just six points below the Tories. And today, polling guru Sir John Curtice told Channel 4 that the hardest thing to predict ahead of this national poll is ‘how bad the defeat for the Conservatives will be’. Oh dear.
The main threat to the Conservatives in Scotland remains the SNP – but with only ten days to go until the general election, Sunak is desperate to fend off any and all rival parties. Will his message cut through? Stay tuned…
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