Tories show progress – in moderation

In his masterly study, “George III and the Politicians”, Richard Pares quoted Horace Walpole on early 18th century Tories: “In truth all the sensible Tories I ever knew were either Jacobites or became Whigs; those that remained Tories, remained fools.”

Walpole was quite right, Pares added: “A Tory who was not a Jacobite had nothing left to be a Tory about, and might just as well become a Whig.” Otherwise “he was sacrificing his political utility to a personal luxury of nomenclature”.

Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Today’s Jacobites, wanting to turn the clock back, are those who would repeal the Scotland Act and abolish the Scottish Parliament. There are such neo-Jacobites in the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (and a number in the Scottish Labour Party too), but they are politically irrelevant. The Scottish Parliament is here to stay, just as the Hanoverians were.So, reluctantly, the Scottish Tories have accommodated themselves to the new regime, just as after 1714 English Tories accepted the first two Georges; and much good it has done them. Support has continued to ebb away. As parliamentary leader, David McLetchie offered an Edinburgh lawyer’s good sense, and his successor, Annabel Goldie, offered charm, wit and a combative spirit; all in vain.

Now we have a new leadership election, and the first thing to say about the three declared candidates, Murdo Fraser, Jackson Carlaw and Ruth Davidson, is that none of them has shown any ability to win a parliamentary election. Fraser may offer the excuse that he stood against John Swinney, but for a Tory to get only 26 per cent of the vote in North Perthshire is, frankly, pathetic. Carlaw failed again in Eastwood, not long ago billed as the safest Tory seat in Scotland. Davidson stood in Glasgow Kelvin and secured 1845 votes, or 7.5 per cent, of those cast. It takes some chutzpah to regard this as a base from which to launch a leadership campaign.

Until the other day none of this mattered. The election seemed likely to resemble a contest for the presidency of a student union. There would be in-fighting and back-biting and name-calling, all the more bitter because the fight itself was the thing, not what the winner would do afterwards; and in any case the election was of no significance to anyone except those immediately involved.

Murdo Fraser has, however, changed the way the game is played. The party is heading for the knacker’s yard, he says. So, if he wins, he will dissolve it and start again – or at least change its name. He will break away from the Conservative Party down south – even though any Fraserite elected to Westminster will take the Tory whip – and he will create a distinctive centre-right Scottish Party, whose relationship to the London party will be like that of the Bavarian CSU to the CDU in the federal German parliament.

His proposal has at least livened things up. Donors huff and puff, some saying “over my dead body”, others saying “go for it, laddie”. Tory former secretaries of state are divided. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, now (safely) MP for Kensington and Chelsea, is in the Fraser camp; Michael Forsyth, now (safely) in the Lords, is against him. Nothing surprising there. Lord Forsyth has always been a last-ditcher, while Sir Malcolm has been a Vicar of Bray: pro-devolution, anti-devolution, pro-devolution again. Indeed, I remember recommending the Fraserian CSU option to him when he was in St Andrews House. Couldn’t be done, he said then; couldn’t afford to break away. (But that, of course, was when The Lady was in number 10, ready to rap his knuckles.) Still, I can’t help thinking the CSU solution comes more than 20 years too late.

Admittedly, there is a difference. My argument then was that an independent Scottish Tory Party would be better placed to resist devolution. Mr Fraser’s is that it will show its commitment to Scotland by taking devolution much further – to devo-max or independence-lite. He will dish the SNP by showing that the Tories, under their new name, can be every bit as nationalist as they are. In other words, this Tory will become a Whig, leaving those that remain Tories to remain fools. A mere change of name is unlikely to be sufficient. They would still be the same bloody Tories to most people. So, if he wins, will he press forward and dissolve the party, as he first seemed to suggest he would. Dissolve the party and elect a new one? Murdo Fraser as a revolutionary Maoist? It’s not a proposal that will please all in the constituencies – perhaps not even all in the constituency where Fraser himself did so badly. So would the party split in the time-honoured manner of Scots Presbyterians? Would we then have the Auld Lichts and the New Lichts, dividing the already meagre Tory vote? Would this be a recipe for renewal?

And suppose he loses the leadership election? What then? Will he march off, face set to the sunrise, to launch his new movement, with the support of his financial backers, some identified, others not? New parties have a poor record of success. Most sink quickly without trace. Murdo Fraser might do better, even though nothing in his record in parliamentary elections suggests he has much popular appeal .

Indeed, it is one of the oddities of the present position that none of the three Tory MSPs who has actually won a constituency seat is putting himself forward as leader. John Lamont with a majority of more than 5000 in Berwickshire, Ettrick & Lauderdale is backing Ruth Davidson, whose vote in May was only a third of his majority. Evidently, he sees qualities in her to which the electors of Glasgow Kelvin were sadly blind.

Finally, what name for the Fraser party? One wit, alert to what he is proposing to do, suggests the Scottish Whig Party. (SWP? Might pick up a few dim Socialist Workers votes.) David Torrance, the historian of the Scottish Tories, harks back to the days when Tories ran cities under the alias of “Progressives”. This reminds me that the Czech Jaroslav Hašek, author of that comic masterpiece The Good Soldier Švejk once started his own party too. In mockery of the orthodox Left’s gradualism, it was to be called “The Party of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law”.

So what about “The Party of Moderate Nationalist Progress within the bounds of the fraying Union.”? Not a snappy name, but it does seem to sum up the Fraser position rather nicely. Hašek incidentally promised everyone who voted for him the free gift of a pocket aquarium, but such generosity might contravene electoral law. Alternatively, Fraser could join the Indy-lite wing of the SNP and leave the Tories to die off.