Michael Fry: Choice for Scots Tories is simple: reform or die

For heaven's sake, progress goes on the whole time, along with a lot of regress too, to give us the result of a messy world – yes that one, the one we just happen to live in. It is for a future historian, not for any politician, to pick out from the pig's breakfast what precisely has amounted to progress.

And the other nightmare appears right here in Scotland, whence all such posture, progressive or otherwise, has long been banished because the Conservative party's sclerotic joints and withered musculature are no longer capable of even as much as taking up a position. Nothing so nice as the cooing of a turtle dove but only the creak of the Zimmer frame is heard in the land, at best accompanied by feeble bleating: "Law-aw-aw-aw! Or-or-or-order!" Can it be long before the last baa sounds?

It is a vivid nightmare indeed, because it adumbrates in one the two possible political fates dreaded by every traditional Tory. It is bad enough that a properly sceptical outlook on life is trampled underfoot in a desperate dash towards complaisance, to pandering to all of the people all of the time. But then the whole gamut of grand old causes appears so irrelevant to a new order of things that they can just be ignored.

That, at any rate, is how I have seen things during the last fortnight on starting awake to calm myself with my own tranquil view of the hills of Fife across the Firth of Forth. If I were a Conservative writing this by the banks of the River Thames, I would be so cock-a-hoop at the return to power after 13 years in the wilderness that nothing else would seem of much importance, especially not Scotland. Here, though, we have no choice but to reflect on the failure of Conservatism, and it has been some consolation to find that happening in these pages over the past couple of weeks.

"But what else could he have done then?" asked Allan Massie about David McLetchie and his maiden speech to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, which stressed how unreconciled he remained to devolution. I happened to be an occasional speechwriter for McLetchie about that time, though I had nothing to do with the maiden speech. But I did draft another speech which a little later won big billing – not least because it got in the end to be delivered, with heavy-handed symbolism, at Hampden Park. McLetchie felt so horrified at what I prompted him to say that he retreated rapidly from it and never mentioned the matter again. My speechwriting career, at least for him, came to an end.

That was a pity, because what I proposed seems to me just as relevant – and untried – a decade later. I said the task of the Conservative party was to rethink its principles all over again in the novel context of devolution: not to question that context, still less to subvert it, but to accept it as the starting point for a restatement of Scottish Conservatism.

This would to my mind have been neither a scrabble for the centre in Cameron's sense, nor the catatonic aversion from independent thinking of McLetchie or now Goldie. It would have expressed what I suspect is, in the final analysis, the most useful function of Conservatism, to secure a status quo not formed by itself.

Sounds nice in theory, how about the practice? The basic implication in terms of policy would have been fiscal freedom for the Scottish Parliament, so that the parties and the people of Scotland could move beyond presenting wish-lists to themselves or to London and towards thinking seriously about what they wanted and how to get it, including what they were willing to forgo to get it.

The Conservative party could then have begun to offer Scots reasons to vote Conservative again. As things stand, I judge there are no such reasons. I myself have not voted Conservative since 2001, and I was not tempted to do so in 2010. The main reason, or at least one main reason, is that Goldie and McLetchie once more failed to respond to the reality of devolved Scotland, in essence because they do not accept it.

If they remain unpersuaded by their party's flatlining over six elections, it is hard to see what will persuade them. The loss of elections is usually an instructive process for any political party. The Scots Tories do not, will not and probably, being too gaga, cannot learn.

Which is why, despite the cogency of the article that Peter Jones wrote on the same sort of subject this week, I am unable to accept his arguments. He foresaw, under the benign, liberal influence of Cameron, "the Tories suddenly becoming the most pro-devolution party, shredding their anti-devolution (and hence anti-Scottish) labels".

But, at the very least, the Tories would need an entire fresh set of MSPs and corps of functionaries at Central Office in Scotland, not to mention some new and hitherto untapped well of membership, because in all of these bodies of men and women, a diehard unionism sits deep.

I have a similar response to the article in the Times by John McTernan, just forcibly retired from his job as political adviser at the Scotland Office. It seems to me he often offered excellent advice there (not that it was always taken). But I cannot admire so much his counsel to the Tories to embrace at least the symbols of Scottish nationhood, after which the substance might come a little more easily to them.

To my mind the time for symbols or feints or manoeuvres or expedients or gambits is over. For these, a moment might once have come, but it also passed quite a long time ago. Now the Conservative party must make a change of substance. It has at the very minimum to cast off its anti-patriotism and become again a patriotic party in the sense understood by most Scots. If that seems too bold, just ask how every conservative party in the world keeps going and even gets elected. Change was what Cameron promised: without this change, the Scottish Conservative party will die, and good riddance too.