Douglas Ross’s mixed legacy of dropped clangers and sterling triumphs
In addition to being Margaret Thatcher’s long-time deputy, William Whitelaw was variously home secretary and Northern Ireland secretary in her governments. However, “Willie”, as everyone knew him, had an even more important role, so much so that the Iron Lady was reputed to have said that “everyone needs a Willie”.
Whitelaw’s principal task was to “spot banana skins” before Maggie stepped on one, resulting in severe embarrassment for herself and her government.
However, as Douglas Gordon Ross steps down on Friday as leader of the Scottish Tories, he has never shown any need for a banana-skin spotter; indeed far from seeking to avoid them, it seems that he has positively sought them out. I’ve seldom seen a politician more attracted to slipping on banana skins than the current regional list MSP for the Highlands and Islands.
His four years at the top were littered with bloomers, U-turns, and red faces – but there were also some properly sterling performances as party leader, where he showed himself capable of regularly getting the better of Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, a former and current first minister, at Holyrood’s Question Time.
Furthermore, one triumph was his no-confidence motion that prompted the unhappy ending for Sturgeon’s chosen successor, Humza Yousaf. And when the Scottish Parliament was riven by ferocious division over Sturgeon’s radical plans for gender reform, Ross was the only party leader to steadfastly oppose it.
His party has a huge job to do in replacing him with someone with his warrior spirit. He and Ruth Davidson, his predecessor, set a very high bar. She brilliantly put the Tories back on the Scottish electoral map, winning 31 seats at the 2016 Holyrood election. Ross not only hung on to them but also increased the “list” vote – denying Sturgeon a parliamentary majority and ultimately forcing her into an almost suicidal coalition deal with the Marxist Scottish Greens.
But these often rumbustious days were littered with dropped clangers. Included in that list would be that having been a Remainer, Ross agreed with Boris Johnson that Brexit should be delivered in the 2019 election. And then after agreeing to serve as a junior Scottish Office minister, he resigned from the Johnson government in protest over Dominic Cummings’s drive north during lockdown.
In 2021, Ross had to apologise for failing to record his £28,000 earnings as a Fifa-registered assistant football referee. The following year he was the first senior Tory to call for Johnson’s resignation over the partygate fiasco, but he then withdrew the call because of the Ukraine crisis. However, he was still one of the Tory MPs who voted against Boris in a Commons confidence motion.
However, what caused Ross to lose support among many Conservatives was his latter behaviour as a parliamentarian. He said he would not stand as an MP in this year’s general election, but then in what looked like a brazen move, he carpet-bagged his way into fighting what looked like a winnable North East constituency, amid allegations that the sitting MP was too ill – claims that the MP denied. Ross promptly fought the seat in the July election… and lost.
He has subsequently been assailed by some pretty typical Scottish Tory infighting which claimed he’d been involved in a plot to assist his favourite candidate get the vacancy created by his resignation. We shall know the result of the leadership election on Friday morning.
As far as is known, Ross intends to stay on as an MSP at least until the next Scottish Parliament election in May 2026.
Labour notched up a huge Commons triumph against the SNP in July and is hoping to score a similar victory for Holyrood and, with the nationalists on the ropes, believes it can form the first devolved Scottish Labour government since 2007.
Nevertheless, the fate of Labour in Scotland in 2026 will be at least partly dependent on how its “big brothers” perform in running the UK economy.
If Keir Starmer’s unpopularity continues, if the UK Tories pick a fighter and the SNP remains in poor shape, the new Scottish Tory leader will have perfect targets at which to aim.
However, as he or she will soon discover, none of these is certain. And that’s the only thing the new leader will know.