If Keir Starmer wins the next general election, today’s interview by Douglas Ross will be seen as a point in that victory. To have the Scottish Tory leader suggest that Scots vote, not for his party, but for Labour in seats where Team Starmer is the strongest opponent to the SNP, is quite remarkable – and a signal that the SNP is not the only party in Scotland with serious leadership issues.
‘I will always encourage Scottish Conservative voters to vote Scottish Conservative,’ he has told the Sunday Telegraph. But when it comes to creating more of these Scottish Tory voters ‘I think generally the public can see, and they want the parties to accept, that where there is the strongest candidate to beat the SNP, you get behind that candidate.’
This is no slip of the tongue. The Times had a story a week or so ago quoting an anonymous Tory source to the same effect: the quote, I thought at the time, did not justify the strong headline: ‘Scottish Tories call for tactical voting to end SNP dominance’. Unless, of course, the source was Ross himself.
Never has a leader of the Scottish Tories suggested people actually vote Labour
Those of us who have been following the fate of the Scottish Tories over the years can point to several low points. There was the 1997 wipeout, the absence of any 2001 recovery, the time where there were more pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs, and the time where they considered liquidating the brand and starting again under a new name. It was once put to me that they rename themselves ‘the effing Tories’ because that was how most Scots referred to them. But never has a leader of the Scottish Tories suggested people actually vote Labour.
We did see signs of tactical voting advocacy in the early days of Holyrood, where local elections would see posters saying ‘Lib Dem voter backing Labour – support the coalition’. But these posters were usually put up cynically, by Labour voters. The Scottish Tories usually argued that, no matter how bleak things were, conservatism was a force for good and one worth voting for. To give up on this basic point would be to give up on conservatism.
If voters in Ross’s seat of Moray had followed such advice in 2005 then the Tories would never have jumped from third to second place: the staging post for Ross to take the seat from Angus Robertson, ex-leader of the SNP in Westminster. I was there at the last general election campaign and Robertson didn’t believe for a second that he was vulnerable. Someone, somewhere (okay, Ruth Davidson) had asked voters to share her faith in conservatism.
Ross leads a unionist party yet seems determined to secede. He once called for Boris Johnson to resign as leader, before changing his mind. Now he is defying Rishi Sunak who is of the opinion that Tory MPs ought to be persuading people to vote Tory (a point made rather forcefully today by Tory HQ). Sunak will be unable to believe how his own party could be plunged into this controversy in Scotland and at a time when the world was focusing on the SNP.
The abandonment of support for any imminent independence referendum – and the revelation about the membership cover-up, not to mention last week’s CSI: SNP drama – will see many supporters come loose from the SNP. Much depends on where they go. There will be Scottish Tory candidates in all kinds of seats where they are third and fourth placed trying their utmost to make the case for conservatism and maximise their vote. How strange for them to know that their supposed leader is not on their side.
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