Leader: New leader will need more than home-spun values

IT REMAINS the case that a small majority of Scottish Tory MSPs believe their party is so sickly they should kill it off, give it a good burial, and then start all over again with something new.

This bleak diagnosis is the backdrop for the new leader, Ruth Davidson who, having opposed that message in last year’s leadership election campaign, yesterday set out to prove that the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party is not a busted flush after all.

In a speech in Glasgow in which she promised to set out her vision, the youthful Ms Davidson made a reasonable start. “We must state not only what we want to achieve, but why we want to achieve it,” she declared. This is absolutely correct.

Both north and south of the Border, Scottish Conservatives have been bedevilled by doubts over their motives. In Scotland, many people have concluded they are profoundly bad. As David Cameron did before her, Ms Davidson is hoping her relative youth and modernity may symbolise a new start, which allows the Tories to get their message across – to explain the whys, not just the whats.

The paradox is that the message itself, unlike the messenger, is one rooted in deeply traditional Conservative beliefs. Yesterday, she sought to align herself with home-spun Scottish values, such as hard work, thrift and enterprise which, she claimed, had been “dampened” by “decades of socialism” in Scotland. The country now needs to rediscover its hard-working spirit, she declared, offering up the debt-averse Germans as role models.

Rip-it-up Eighties capitalism is now very much out within the Tory camp. In its place is a call for something far more old-fashioned: gritty Scottish endeavour, designed to recover the country’s reputation for minding the pennies.

All very well – but questions remain. First, and while it is early days, Ms Davidson has been short of specifics. A policy review is under way, but if the new leader is to silence critics who deride her lack of detail, she will need to put flesh the bones soon. As a centre-right figure, she has to confront the long-term unsustainability of Scotland’s public-sector spending. She cannot simply be a rerun of Cameron-ism circa 2005, promising to share the proceeds of growth, now that growth has ceased to exist.

Secondly, she cannot ignore the SNP and Alex Salmond for ever. Many voters who may yesterday have nodded along with Ms Davidson’s analysis of Scotland’s political culture currently express their opinions by happily voting Nationalist. Appealing to them, while opposing a stronger Scottish Parliament – which goes against the grain of modern Scottish politics – could prove a task too far.

But, at least by using her first speech to set out her values, the new leader showed she intends to be defined on her own terms, not anyone else’s. That shows leadership and, for her beleaguered party colleagues, that is a start.