“We’ve used opposition to independence as a crutch,” says Shane Painter, the Scottish Tories’ youngest candidate in the recent, disastrous general election.
“People are fed-up hearing about the constitution,” he says. “They want to know what we’ll do about farming, housing, oil and gas.”
While the Tories at Westminster pick up the pieces after their crushing defeat on 4 July and select a replacement for Rishi Sunak, Scottish Conservatives are likewise choosing a new leader in a contest that ends on Friday.
The challenges facing Tories in Scotland are similarly existential, as the party wrestles with the diminishing threat of independence, growing support for Reform and the toxic legacy left by the outgoing leader, Douglas Ross.
Speaking to members across the north-east, one of the party’s strongholds in Scotland, there is consensus that the Tories must shift their focus from opposing independence after the SNP’s election rout. “I want a leader who will shout about what we stand for and put young people, women and BAME members at the top table,” says Painter, a recent politics graduate. “Meghan Gallacher is that person.”
Gallacher is one of three candidates vying for the top job. She was elected to Holyrood in 2021, still in her 20s, and became deputy leader a year later, taking her first maternity leave from the frontbench. She resigned as deputy last month after allegations emerged that Ross tried to install another candidate, Russell Findlay, as his replacement a year ago.
Findlay, who says he was unaware of this plot, is a former investigative journalist, current justice spokesperson, and popular Holyrood personality. He is widely considered the favourite to win, and has been endorsed by much-missed former leader Ruth Davidson.
Experienced backbencher Murdo Fraser, who stood against Davidson in 2011 on the prospectus of splitting from the UK Conservative party, is the third candidate.
One point of agreement among members supporting different candidates is unhappiness with the conduct of the campaign.
“The sniping and briefing against candidates has been disappointing,” says John Wheeler, former candidate for Aberdeen South. “We’ve not seen it in the UK campaign at all.” Wheeler is supporting Findlay because “he has a strong hinterland and looks at things differently from someone who has only worked at Holyrood”.
The campaign has certainly had some ugly moments, many of which can be traced back to events before the election, when Ross infuriated Holyrood colleagues and local members by parachuting himself in to the seat of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, after party management blocked the anticipated candidate, David Duguid, then recovering from a spinal injury. The backlash was such that Ross resigned mid-campaign. He lost the seat to the SNP after Reform surged to nearly 15%.
“The way that David Duguid was treated still makes my blood boil,” says Frances McKay, a solicitor from Macduff, who describes herself as a “quiet” member.
Councillor Mark Findlater, Duguid’s campaign manager, says the way the sick man was treated was “reprehensible”. Local activists are still waiting for answers about why they weren’t consulted; party membership in Banff and Buchan has plummeted from 260 to 80 as a result, he says.
“A lot of people didn’t turn out to vote and some did vote for Reform as a punishment for what happened to David,” says Findlater, who has yet to decide his preference but raises concerns about Findlay being the “continuity candidate”.
Some suggest this ongoing bitterness makes it difficult to interpret Reform’s relative success – it secured 7% of the vote across Scotland in July despite doing little campaigning here.
“This should be ringing alarm bells to the party establishment,” says Nathan Noble, who lectures in computing in Aberdeen. “Most people are brushing it off as a protest vote about David Duguid but that doesn’t explain how we lost more deposits and were overtaken by them in 25 seats.”
A series of council byelections later this autumn will test how deep support for Reform runs.
Noble is supporting Fraser, who he believes will “give the party back to its members” and end top-down decision-making.
“We need a more localised approach to policy formation and campaigning. For example, there’s not enough discussion of alternative ideas beyond our support for the oil and gas sector in the north-east.”
There has been a strong sense, particularly over the Boris Johnson years, that the Scottish party has been dragged down by “the whole Westminster Tory carry-on”, as McKay puts it, but there appears to be little appetite for the wider debate about the future of the centre-right in Scotland that was predicted earlier in the summer.
“There’s a real appetite for change now,” says Braiden Smith, Scotland lead for LGBT+ Conservatives and a Findlay supporter, “and it’s about the message we’re offering. When previous Tory voters chose not to in July, it had nothing to do with our relationship with the UK party; it was because they weren’t given a positive reason to do so”.