I S LITTLE SCOTLAND’S voice about to be heard at last? In the Brexit referendum of 2016, fully 62% of Scots backed Remain. To no avail—England’s vastly greater size ensured that a narrow majority for Leave in the south dictated Britain’s exit from the European Union. Since then, Scotland’s politicians have largely played the role of bystanders as the Conservatives and Labour in Westminster have scrapped with each other, and between themselves, for control of the Brexit agenda. Scotland’s influence, so heavily felt in the cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, has waned sharply.

The arrival of Boris Johnson in 10 Downing Street suggests that a strain of English nationalism, embraced by Mr Johnson in an attempt to see off the threat of Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party, is to play a prominent role in Tory thinking. This has proved too much for Ruth Davidson, the popular leader of Scotland’s Conservatives, who last week announced her departure.

In her resignation speech on August 29th Ms Davidson stressed the pressure that political leadership has placed on her family (she recently returned from maternity leave) more than any conflict with her Westminster colleagues. But her personal relationship with Mr Johnson has long been poor, and her brand of liberal Conservatism—she regularly cites Sir John Major, prime minister in 1990-97, as a touchstone—is suddenly unfashionable. Any possibility that she might unseat Nicola Sturgeon, first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) , at the next election to the devolved parliament in 2021, was becoming slimmer by the day.

Yet her departure carries significant danger for the Conservative Party on both sides of the border. Under her eight-year leadership, driven by her distinctive energy, forthrightness and wit, the Scottish Tories returned from the electoral dead. In 2011, the year she took over, they had 15 seats in the Scottish Parliament and one at Westminster. She leaves the party as the official opposition at Holyrood, with 31 seats, and with 13 seats at Westminster.

Mr Johnson needs those Westminster seats to stay blue in the general election that is expected to be called soon. In the election of 2017, a disastrous night for the Tories in England, the strong showing of the Scottish Conservatives was crucial to keeping the party in government. But the Tory roots in those Scottish seats are shallow, and the margin of victory last time mostly nothing to write home about. A majority of voters backed Remain in all but one of them. In Stirling, for example, where an SNP majority of 10,480 in 2015 gave way to a Conservative majority of 148 in 2017, only about a third voted Leave. The Tories would lose ten of their 13 seats to the SNP if there were an election, according to a YouGov poll for the Times on September 4th.

It is not just Mr Johnson’s government that is at stake, but the future of the union itself. Ms Davidson has been the main pro-British figure in Scotland since the independence referendum of 2014. She redesigned her party to make it more palatable to Scots, and reaped the electoral benefits. Her departure is a huge boost to Ms Sturgeon, who hopes to secure a second independence referendum within a few years and who will regard winning it as eminently more achievable in the absence of her erstwhile opponent.

Ms Davidson’s successor matters, therefore. Scottish Tory insiders expect a run-off between a pro-Brexit, pro-Johnson candidate (possibly Jackson Carlaw, Ms Davidson’s deputy), who might wrap himself in a union flag and prove popular with party members, and a candidate who argues for more distance and autonomy from the English party, such as Murdo Fraser, who is likely to be favoured by Tory members of the Scottish Parliament. The outcome will determine the shape of Scottish politics for years to come—and perhaps the survival or otherwise of the union. ■