Michael Fry: Steep learning curve faces PM over the Union

The first trip outside London by the Prime Minister takes him to Edinburgh, to show himself to the most disaffected bit of Britain he governs.

William Hague's behaviour is normal: the surprise would be if he had gone anywhere else. David Cameron's behaviour is highly abnormal. Perhaps in the distant past Sir Alec Douglas-Home might have escaped to Scotland, but only so he could fish the Tweed. Or further back, Lord Rosebery got migraines from being at Westminster, and required a rapid return to Dalmeny to cure them.

I cannot think of any other leader who has lost so little time in covering the 400 miles between the two capitals. Margaret Thatcher was a hyperactive prime minister, but it took her a while to get round to Edinburgh: "I never knew you had all this here," she exclaimed in amazement to George Younger as he escorted her through Holyrood (the palace, not his brewery opposite that was to make way for the Scottish Parliament).

It seems safe to say that future British prime ministers, at least the Conservatives among them, will be unable to get away with such ignorance. Nowadays the Union cannot be taken for granted but has to be cared for and nurtured by those who want to preserve it. And Mr Cameron's learning curve will need to be steep.

It will need to be all the steeper because the advice and information on which Mr Cameron has up to this point relied has turned out to be, as is said in these parts, mince. While he was still engaged in wooing the voters where they had to be wooed, in the south of England, it was understandable he paid no more attention than was strictly necessary to the sullen, suspicious Scots. Now Scotland has to move up his agenda far and fast.

Cameron seems good at elegant little coups, and the first thing he should do is arrange for the extinction by some convenient means of all those who have been running the Scottish Conservative Party since the asteroid struck it in 1997, indeed since before then.

"I'm sure if we just keep munching these ferns", says David the Dinosaur to Annabel the Ankylosaur, "everything will turn right next year."

But the nuclear darkness goes on. And beasts which cannot adapt to a new environment die out.

Though I left the Tory party in disgust several years ago, I still speak to my old pals and many were convinced that they really could launch a comeback in Scotland. They had found fresh candidates, a few of them even quite sexy. They had beefed up their electoral machine. They had set an official target of 11 seats. As the poll opened, some claimed four of them were more or less in the bag.

As the poll closed they found their position in Scotland had if anything got worse. OK, there was a tiny increase in the national share of the vote. But all the talk of painting the Borders blue had turned out to be just guff. In lush Glaswegian suburbia, Eastwood slipped further away than ever, surely now beyond the Conservative grasp. There was no compensation in Edinburgh, nothing beyond the Forth and Clyde either.

We have to conclude it was not a matter of the medium, whether candidates or machinery or methods. So it must have been a matter of the message. This is what I think: at heart the Tories still hate devolved Scotland. They may not actually say they do, but I know they do. And devolved Scotland hates them back. Unless this mutual loathing somehow softens, the Scottish Conservative Party will sooner or later die.

I am using harsh words, but I think they are justified. During the campaign, Cameron took a personal step forward by regretting the way his party had thwarted Scottish aspirations before 1997. It is good the leader should say this, but for how many besides himself was he speaking?

David McLetchie, in his maiden speech to the Scottish Parliament, said he was sorry to be there. Has he changed his mind since? If he has, why does he not say so too? Does Annabel Goldie have any thoughts on the subject? An idle question, perhaps, since Annabel has only two thoughts of any kind: hang 'em, flog 'em.

Meanwhile their attack dogs in the press openly call for the Scottish Parliament to be abolished – not just starved of cash, or shackled with controls, or robbed of powers, but actually done away with.

True, the Conservatives did join in the Calman commission, which drew up proposals for handing Scotland a modest degree of fiscal responsibility. But though they signed the report when it came out some months ago it soon emerged that they did not actually support the proposals.

Once the election was over they would bring forward some of their own, though these were never specified and in any case could probably not be implemented for at least one Parliament. Now the election has come and gone and Calman is after all included in the agreement between Mr Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg for the five years ahead.

A change of heart is still a change of heart, you may say, even if brought about with an elbow twisted behind the back. But I do not believe it. This week one Conservative MSP (I cannot give details because the meeting took place under Chatham House rules) set out how it should still be possible to thwart the Calman report. In public the Tories are behind that agreement; in private we hear different.

It is because I know the Tories so well, as a member of the party for 35 years and twice a parliamentary candidate, that I refuse to accept they have had a change of heart about Scotland. And if Cameron cannot persuade me, as one who remains a philosophical Conservative while casting my vote willy-nilly for another party, then how is he going to persuade the hundreds of thousands of Scots with no such predisposition to listen?

I do not believe he and his party can speak with conviction unless they actually mean what they say about their respect for the new Scotland. And I do not think they do mean what they say. So they remain doomed, and we should leave them to rot.