David Torrance: Will timid Scots Tories ever show backbone?

After giving me a lengthy, and often quite perceptive, analysis of the party's failings in terms of leadership, organisation, policies and guiding philosophy, I asked what he was going to do about it. I was greeted with a blank expression carrying the implicit reply: absolutely nothing.

Although the recent appointment of grandee Lord Sanderson to chair a review of the "structures, functions and operational activity" of the party in Scotland (not, as has been widely reported, its future direction) may appear to be a response of sorts, it is in fact an excuse to do nothing at all. The commission's recommendations have already been decided; Sanderson and his compatriots (including Sunday's addition of Lord Forsyth) simply exist to add a consultative veneer to the whole shoddy process.

Was there a peep from any of the 16 Conservative MSPs at Holyrood, few (if any) of whom seem to have been consulted about Sanderson's appointment? Not at all, or at least not on the record. As usual, they stood idly by and took what was doled out to them from Conservative Central Office, now housed in two dusty rooms in a dusty street in Edinburgh's New Town.

In fact, the notion that these elected members have any degree of control of the party has been well and truly blown out of the water since the general election. Instead, the party chairman – the nice but ineffectual Andrew Fulton – and his colleague (and, in truth, his boss) Mark McInnes, director of the Scottish party, are now contriving to wield absolute power, over candidate selection, organisation and, to all intents and purposes, the MSPs themselves. It is no mistake that McInnes decided the membership of Sanderson's commission, of which he is also secretary.

The lack of formal challenge to this power grab is astonishing. A recent election debriefing is a case in point. A Tory MSP tells me that McInnes provided the group with lots of devastating insights, like "we didn't do well because we underestimated the number of people who are anti-Tory", while paradoxically predicting that next year's Holyrood election would add a few more members to their ranks. Except in Glasgow, where Bill Aitken was told of imminent defeat and so announced his retirement the next day.

Instead of concentrating minds, the 2011 Scottish Parliament election is simply prolonging Tory agony. It cannot, so the feeble argument goes, possibly do anything radical over the next few months, because with another campaign imminent it would be politically unwise. The trouble is that this analysis will probably apply in the wake of each subsequent election result. After 2011, it will be local authority elections, after that the Euro poll and after that another general election.

Thus the once-mighty Scottish Conservative Party stumbles complacently into further decline. The charming Annabel Goldie is now (and I have for long defended her leadership against its sillier detractors) irredeemably part of the problem. She is conservative with a big "C", to the extent that she cannot contemplate change, no matter how grim the context.

She is clearly in denial, thus her astonishing proclamation shortly after the election that the Tory campaign "had won a lot of praise", as had her role within it.

It has also become embarrassingly clear that David Cameron, who has tried hard in Scotland since becoming leader in 2005, has simply given up on his ancestral land. The Scottish question, in his eyes, has been answered by stuffing the Scotland Office full of Liberal Democrats. And who can blame him? The once effective cry of "no mandate" from the SNP has been stifled, and the Prime Minister can get on with governing the rest of the country.

It doesn't need to be that way. There exists within the group at least a trio of sharper, younger MSPs who realise instinctively what needs to be done: chiefly an all-out drive for full fiscal responsibility (what could be more Tory?), a more radical edge to wider policy and a change in elected (and non-elected) personnel which was only hinted at in a recent reshuffle.

Yet even within that group there is reticence. Alas, this is nothing new. There existed a similar period of angst in the mid-1960s, when declining electoral fortunes and organisational malaise led Young Turks, such as George Younger, Teddy Taylor and Alick Buchanan-Smith, to take the party by the scruff of the neck.

I stumbled across a letter to Younger, about whom I was writing a biography, from a former Scottish Tory official called Ian McIntyre. Not only did he lambast the lack of an "effective or credible chairman" in Central Office, but attacked amateurish organisation and the party's "lack of credibility" in Scotland. "There comes a point beyond which", he told Younger, "it becomes tedious and embarrassing to be associated with failure on the Scottish Tory scale."

That was in 1966, when the Conservatives had lost four of their 24 Scottish MPs at a general election. Senior figures considered this to be evidence of terminal decline – oh, what the party would give for 20 seats today! That result did, however, instigate action and by the 1979 election the party had increased its share of the vote, and even its number of MPs, following nearly two decades of drift and decline.

So it is not impossible to turn things around, although I doubt Tory MSPs or party officials even want to try. Oliver Brown memorably remarked that, following the 1967 Hamilton by-election, a shiver rang along the Labour front bench looking for a spine to run up. A shiver also runs along the Conservative benches at Holyrood, but has discovered no outlet; it shivers still, and will grow more violent and damaging until it does.

During a memorable exchange at Prime Minister's Questions in April 1983, Denis Healey accused Margaret Thatcher of being "frightened" about the verdict of the electorate. "Afraid? Frightened? Frit?" she stormed, deploying her Lincolnshire dialect. "Could not take it? Cannot stand it?" I'm afraid the same is now true of certain Tory MSPs. They are afraid, frightened, or indeed "frit" – and for that they have only themselves to blame.