Ruth Davidson: “I have not been on the floor of Holyrood for the last 12 years. I think that is a plus”

RUTH Davidson is fond of telling an anecdote that illustrates the moribund state of today’s Scottish Conservative Party.

While she has been travelling around Scotland canvassing for votes, she has been trying to find out when the party last had a membership drive.

No-one involved in the party was able to tell her, until she met a long-serving Tory member in the Edinburgh North and Leith constituency.

“A woman called Isobel Cram told me she remembered the last one, which was in the late 1930s, and she is 92,” Ms Davidson said, the surprise evident in her voice.

“I was a bit shocked when she came back with that.”

It was a reminder, as if one was needed, that much must be done to attract new members, and therefore recruitment will be one of Ms Davidson’s first priorities, should she succeed in defeating Murdo Fraser, Jackson Carlaw and Margaret Mitchell in the race for the Scottish Tory leadership.

“I know that asking people to join us works,” Ms Davidson said. “If you look at David Cameron in 2008, he went on the telly and said ‘We want more candidates, you don’t have to have been a member of the party forever, but you have to have Conservative values and demonstrate service’ and he got over 5,000 applicants from that one interview. We have to get out and ask people to join us. They are not going to come to us by osmosis.”

As one might expect of a former journalist who worked for the BBC before entering politics, she has plenty of ideas when it comes to improving the Scottish Conservatives’ media profile. The Conservatives, she acknowledges, are “a long way behind” the impressive machine that is the SNP’s campaigning team.

“I want us to make much better use of new-media campaigning. In the election, the SNP had a bank of screens up and they were watching in real time what was trending on Twitter and placing their Google ads next to the keywords in live time. We don’t have an up-to-date e-mail list of our members,” she said.

Hang on, have there not been complaints that Ms Davidson’s campaign team have been using party e-mail lists to canvass members? “No, I don’t [have the list] for a start,” Ms Davidson said. “I am not sure how well we administer ourselves and keep on top of that. It is a nonsense. These are lots of things we can do to modernise our party and make it into a proper campaigning force.”

It has not just been allegations about e-mails that have been made against Ms Davidson’s campaign. The party’s spin doctor, Ramsay Jones, has been suspended after attending a meeting of campaign strategists at Ms Davidson’s Glasgow home.

On this matter, Ms Davidson was reluctant to say much, simply stating that she cannot discuss a man’s employment with the press for fear of “colouring” the investigation.

Her supporters, however, claim Ms Davidson has been the victim of a desperate smear campaign waged by rivals who are beginning to realise that the newly elected 32-year-old MSP is shaping up to win the contest.

If she does win, she intends to overhaul the funding structure, attracting a broader base of donors beyond the generous few who currently finance the party in Scotland.

Also, she wants the party to stop fielding “paper” candidates – those who stand for election in name only, on the basis that they have no chance of winning.

It is a damning indictment of the party’s commitment to some seats that this has happened in the past.

“We have had in previous elections, both at Westminster and the Scottish parliamentary elections, people in the party who have got phone calls saying ‘Look, we can’t get a candidate for this particular seat. Will you do it? Can we put your name down? You don’t have to do anything’,” Ms Davidson said. “Now, we should not have paper candidates in any part of the country. We should be fighting every single seat with full vigour.”

She may be regarded as the least politically experienced of the four candidates, but Ms Davidson regards her relative youth as an advantage that will help the party attract younger voters and members.

As an openly gay politician, who lists kickboxing as one of her hobbies, she is a far cry from the stereotypical Tory.

“The fact that I am a young person will be helpful. I am that sort of working person in that age range that perhaps we haven’t done well to attract in the past. Perhaps there is an audience that I am able to speak to or grab the attention of slightly easier than some of my colleagues,” she said.

“I am a new face and I have fresh ideas and I have not been on the floor of Holyrood for the last 12 years. I actually think that is a plus. The idea that we could only get one MSP through the door in May shows the extent of the problem.

“The sort of generational change that I offer will give us an opportunity to speak to some people that perhaps haven’t been listening to us.”

She added: “I think I have managed to attract support right across the political spectrum of our membership. For every Lord Forsyth, who safe to say is probably from the right of the party, my campaign manager is John Lamont, who is a member of the Tory Reform Group from the very socially liberal side of the party and progressive side.”

As for her sexuality, she maintains that it has not been a factor while she has been campaigning for the leadership.

“To be honest, it really hasn’t [been an issue],” she said. “People outside the party never ever give our members enough credit about how progressive they are. But our members know how to pick winners.”

If she is to emerge from this contest as leader, she has to persuade members not to be seduced by Murdo Fraser’s plan to abolish the party and form a new centre-right political force.

“I think Murdo has been asking the right questions. It is the right forum in a leadership election to lay out different visions. But I think he has come up with the wrong answer. I don’t think changing the name, divorcing from London, sitting in coalition with Conservatives not being Conservatives at Westminster is going to make us any stronger as a party. I think it will weaken us,” she said.

“I am proud of being a Conservative and Unionist. That’s the party that I joined, because I wanted to be a member of that party. Many of our members up and down the country feel the same. There is an understanding that we do need to change. It is about changing our voice, changing our message and changing how we speak to people. It is not about dissolving ourselves, transferring our assets and reconstituting ourselves.” TOM PETERKIN