With party on brink of Westminster revival under Ruth Davidson, the main political dynamic in Scotland is now SNP v Tories

For the first time in decades, Scotland’s Tories have a confident gleam in their eyes. Almost exactly 20 years after being wiped from Scotland’s electoral map by New Labour in 1997, losing all its MPs, the party is on the brink of a Westminster revival.

The first Scottish opinion polls published since Theresa May announced the snap election suggest the Scottish Tories could win up to a dozen Westminster seats, nearly all of them at the expense of Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National party.

A Survation poll for the Sunday Post put the Tories at 28%, against 43% for the SNP, with Sturgeon’s party seven points lower than its vote in 2015. At that level, the Conservatives would win up to eight seats.

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For the Sunday Times, a Panelbase survey put Tory support at its highest since the 1970s, at 33% against 44% for the SNP. In theory, that would give the Tories 12 Westminster seats – a total the party privately regards as fanciful.

Yet such polls offer fresh evidence that the EU referendum result has disrupted politics in the same way the independence referendum did in 2014: this time the Tories appear to be the beneficiaries.

Reinvigorated by its combative Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, the party has selected several strong candidates to fight the election. Davidson had the advantage of predicting May would call a snap election: she had proposed one last October.

Talk of a Conservative revival has been a perennial theme in Scottish politics, with Tory optimism inevitably crushed by electoral reality. But Davidson’s success in last year’s Scottish elections in which the Tories came second for the first time at Holyrood, winning 31 seats, strengthens their confidence.

One of her closest allies at Holyrood, John Lamont, is again contesting Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, where he holds the coterminous Holyrood seat. Lamont narrowly lost there in 2015, leaving the sitting SNP MP, Calum Kerr, protecting the UK’s fifth-smallest majority at 300.

The Tories are also angling to retake the former unionist heartland seat of Perth and North Perthshire, held by one of the SNP’s longest-serving MPs, Pete Wishart. They have selected Ian Duncan, a locally born Tory MEP; unlike previous Conservative candidates, Duncan has a public profile and experience.



With the SNP firmly embedded as Scotland’s dominant centre-left party, squeezing Labour out of the running in all but a very small handful of constituencies, Davidson’s success in Holyrood last year, and in the polls, shows the main political dynamic now pits SNP against Tory.

Sturgeon has some justification identifying the Scottish election contest as a two-horse race. That was the major theme of her speech to the Scottish Trades Union Congress annual meeting in Aviemore, where she couched this contest as a battle between left and right, between “hard Brexit” and progressive pro-Europeanism.

With opinion polls consistently showing voter ambivalence about the case for independence and about the case for a new independence referendum, Sturgeon hopes to downplay the constitutional question, focusing instead on domestic politics.

Sturgeon’s official position is that she won her mandate for a referendum in last year’s Holyrood election, when the SNP narrowly failed to win an overall majority. The constitution is, however, unavoidable.

Sturgeon focuses heavily on Brexit, insisting it can only weaken Scotland’s already stuttering economy. Davidson focuses instead on Scotland’s other constitutional question, prioritising her opposition to a second independence referendum in both the local elections next week and the June general election.

The Scottish Tories’ first election poster states simply: “We said no. We meant it.” Davidson is targeting Corbyn, too, attacking his ambivalence on an independence referendum in an attempt to draw in strongly unionist traditional Labour voters.

ScotConservatives (@ScotTories) Only a vote for the Scottish Conservatives will send a strong message that we oppose SNP’s divisive plan for a second referendum. pic.twitter.com/XUmDdg7VXZ

She is right to be cautious about making exaggerated predictions. Even with Panelbase showing Labour at 18%, its highest Scottish figure for a while, it would struggle to win new seats and will have to fight to save its single seat in Edinburgh South.

The Lib Dems, however, are confident too of winning back seats from the SNP. Jo Swinson is its candidate again in East Dunbartonshire, while Edinburgh West, where the former SNP MP Michelle Thomson has had legal problems, is a strong prospect.

In all, the polls suggest the SNP would be fortunate to win many more than 50 seats. Yet even so, Sturgeon will still claim with some justification to have “won” the Scottish general election. Even if the Holyrood result was her official mandate, winning 50 Westminster seats would be all the endorsement she needs to continue pressing for the big prize: a second independence referendum.