Drowning, not waving

Scottish Tories did not expect much from last night's election. They were right.

In the end the Scottish Conservatives also got their pickings in an election from which it had never seemed they could come away with much.

Some senior figures expected bad news in the overnight results out of the constituencies. In the last Scottish parliament the Tories held three of these 73 seats, none of them absolutely safe.

Yet in the most marginal of all, Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, a bluff and hearty local farmer, Alex Ferguson, increased his majority from 99 to more than 3,000 against a challenge by the SNP which somehow turned out feebler than in the rest of Scotland.

Then came a surprise when a novice, John Lamont, seized Roxburghshire and Berwickshire from the LibDems in their heartland of the Borders. This was a region where the original Liberal revival had taken off in the 1960s under the youthful David Steel. It continues to buck, or maybe to set, the trend.

A key question is how far these modest successes offer evidence that the Cameron effect is at last starting to seep across the Cheviot Hills. Up to now it had stubbornly refused to appear. On the contrary, Scottish Conservatives have been flatlining at a dismal level hardly changed in the opinion polls since their electoral collapse in 1997.

The party only survived in pockets, and the south of Scotland is the largest of those pockets. Two slightly unexpected victories in the region have not altered the national picture.

Further north the picture is a good deal grimmer. Stirling, once the stronghold of the Thatcherite Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsyth, had turned since his time into a three-way marginal. At this election the Nationalist came from third position to overhaul Labour, and to leave an able Tory candidate standing.

In Gordon, where Alex Salmond could never be quite sure of winning till he did, the crucial margin in his majority arose out of a plunge in the Conservative vote. Some people who had previously voted for a unionist position must have switched straight across to nationalism. Salmond made his pitch here to a prosperous constituency rather than to one, like so many in Scotland, nursing a sense of grievance.

Similarly in West Aberdeenshire, which contains Balmoral, the Tories had clung on to second place against the odds for over a decade. This time they vanished like snow off a dyke, and the Nats took over as challengers to the LibDems.

Almost everywhere north of the Forth-Clyde valley, the Conservative vote has this time shrunk still further from an already depressed level. Losses on the lists, from which the other 56 MSPs are returned, cancel out the gains elsewhere. So in the second, proportional vote, which finally determines the level of representation in the Scottish Parliament, the Tories continue to flatline with scarcely a blip.

Only when the last results are in is Annabel Goldie, leader of the Scottish party, likely to decide on her own future. If her performance is judged wanting, she may well bow out of the rough-and-tumble to stand for the post of presiding officer in the third Scottish parliament.

Her distinctive brand of matronly wit would serve her better in the chair at Holyrood than in the earnest discussion of policy, for which she showed little relish during the campaign. Just what new policies the Scots Tories could or should adopt under their next leader remains a bit of a puzzle.
