Leader: Clear blue water

Published on Thursday 24 June 2010 14:18

THE Scottish Tories may this weekend be mindful of the wise old adage, "be careful what you wish for". In the 20 years since the resignation of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party has been desperately trying to put some clear blue water between itself and the party at a UK level.

Again and again, as election after election failed to produce a Scottish breakthrough, the analysis has been that candidates fighting under a Tory banner north of the Border are tainted by the Scots' folk memory of Thatcherism, and are regarded as somehow anti-Scottish. Many in the party have urged greater autonomy and distinctiveness for the Scottish Tories - to the extent that a name change is one of the ideas currently being considered by a commission on the party's future, chaired by Lord Sanderson.

Now, however, it seems the party has no need to try any longer. In the few short weeks since the general election a remarkable distance has opened up between the Scottish and UK parties, to the extent that Cameron as prime minister has not had one single conversation with the leader of his party in Scotland, Annabel Goldie. In fact, the only communication between them has been a congratulatory message from Goldie at the birth of the Camerons' daughter.

At first glance this seems extraordinary - Cameron has had half a dozen conversations with the SNP's Alex Salmond in that time. On consideration, however, it is merely a symptom of a new political landscape whose unfamiliar contours and sudden gradients we are still coming to terms with. Cameron has, in effect, handed responsibility for Scotland to his junior coalition partners, the Lib Dems. It is a price - one of many - of coalition government. Elsewhere in Whitehall, what we see is not full-throttle Conservatism, but the compromise politics of the new administration. Scottish Tories, therefore find themselves in the curious position of being much further to the right of the Tory-led UK government on a range of issues - short-term prison sentences being just one obvious example. This is not how Scots Tories envisaged the clear blue water.

Cameron may not rank his relationship with the Scottish Conservatives as very high on his list of priorities at the moment. He has, after all, other worries. The tail-end of the summer has been dominated by two stories that are exactly what Cameron does not need. First there are renewed questions about whether Number 10's director of communications, Andy Coulson, lied to parliament. And second, the gossip-fest surrounding William Hague's public denial that he had a homosexual relationship with a young special adviser.

However ill-advised Hague's public statement was - and there seems to be general agreement that he was unwise to be drawn publicly on what was little more than tittle-tattle - here we have the media dominated by a story about a Conservative foreign secretary that is outwith Cameron's control.Similarly with Coulson - who is a key part of the Cameron project - the matters at issue concern the spin doctor's actions when editor of the News of the World, and are therefore out of Cameron's hands. The return to politics as usual with the end of the Commons recess tomorrow therefore cannot come soon enough for the Tory-led coalition government.

For the Scottish Tories, meanwhile, the new political landscape could be seen as more of an opportunity than a problem. Freed of the constant pressure to be in step with London, they now have the chance to forge a new identity on their own terms. The question they have to wrestle with, however, is whether Annabel Goldie is the right leader to take them into this new and challenging phase.