PERHAPS Ruth Davidson’s conscience was bothering her when she decided to send 600,000 ‘personalised’ letters (that’s “personalised” as in facsimile) to those whom she believes to be disaffected Labour and Lib-Dem voters this week.

The leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s commendable attempt to add some value to the Royal Mail comes just a few months after her bosses in London undervalued it by £180 million, before flogging off our share in it cheaply to their avid friends in banking, pensions, insurance and hedge funds.

Davidson’s letter-writing campaign is targeting those voters who, she feels, had their love for the UK Union rekindled during the Scottish independence referendum campaign.

Since then, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have grudgingly permitted their members a free vote on the independence question should it soon arise again. This, of course, leaves the Scottish Tories as the true defenders of the Union in Scotland.

Davidson genuinely believes her party can beat Scottish Labour into second place in May’s Holyrood elections.

Such has been the collapse of the Labour vote all over Scotland that the Taliban might fancy their chances, too.

And so the Tories are getting excited that they can become meaningful in Scotland for the first time since the Margaret Thatcher era.

They were deemed to have had a decent referendum simply because they were able to campaign for something they believed in that didn’t also involve making poor people poorer and rich people richer.

Sometimes during the referendum campaign, phrase-books at the ready, they actually got to stand next to real working class people thanks to those nice Labour chaps like Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy joining forces with them to howl down Scottish independence.

No one did more than these three to bring the party that they purported to love to the edge of electoral oblivion in Scotland. And no one did more to fill the Scottish Tories’ sails with optimism.

In the unlikely event that the Tories do become the official opposition at Holyrood after the May vote, then I hope Davidson has the good grace to thank her Three Amigos for helping put them there.

Perhaps she could write them a personalised letter.

The Tories are also buoyed at having as their leader a woman who is bright, eloquent, energetic and who possesses a degree of charisma.

Tory campaigners and activists have been told to use her name in their opening gambits on doorsteps up and down the country. She is that rare thing in Scottish politics: a senior Conservative whose very name doesn’t engender feelings of deep unpleasantness and hostility. Her party, not surprisingly, are milking it.

Davidson herself feels that there are Labour and Lib Dem supporters still sweet and sentimental on the UK Union to the extent that this has become the most important factor in their political thinking.

The trouble with this line of thought though, is obvious: if many of this species does exist, the chances are that they’ll also be sweet and sentimental on things like jobs, decent wages, trade unions, fair taxation and opposing an austerity which targets the poor.

Indeed, so adroit an operator has Davidson become (despite never once being in danger of actually being declared winner in a constituency contest herself) that she has managed to convince some left-leaning commentators that the Scottish Conservatives have metamorphosed into the Westminster Tories’ enchanting little sisters who want to be friends with everyone. In truth though, they are about as harmless as Chucky, the psychotic doll.

So let’s remind ourselves what the Westminster Tories, backed by their Scottish counterparts, stand for.

This is a party which is about to introduce anti-trade union legislation which will make it much more difficult for working people to organise against corrupt and unfair working practices.

They will also make it harder for unions to fund the Labour Party, leaving the Tories themselves free to be funded by bosses who won’t provide a living wage to their lowest-paid employees.

This party has chosen to deploy air strikes against a terror organisation in the full and certain knowledge that they will kill civilians.

This is also a party which refuses to take its fair share of refugees from Syria, Iran and Iraq, while seeking to kick out non-EU migrants in April if they don’t earn the London rate of £35k a year.

The Conservative Party has been cited as being responsible for almost 100 suicides in the UK owing to its punitive and medieval approach to punishing poor, sick and elderly people by withholding their cash lifelines. Yet many of them have been sponging off someone else’s money since the day they were born.

This party, which employs Ruth Davidson and to whom she swears total loyalty, has refused to punish those in the banking industry who wrecked the UK economy and has since permitted them to indulge in their culture of personal enrichment.

They have sold off dozens of British assets to anonymous cartels while refusing to lift a finger to help the British steel industry in its death throes.

This contrasts sharply with their attitude to another of their favoured cultural communities: the farmers, many of whom became millionaires following their foot and mouth compensation awards.

The Conservative Party stands for inequality and unfairness. It is run by people whose own unearned wealth and privilege requires them to uphold and defend that of others. It seeks not to make Britain wealthy, but to enrich a tiny British elite.

This wicked, corrosive and distorted view of society is what Ruth Davidson supports too.

It really should not be beyond the abilities of Scottish Labour to remind everyone of this and to keep this party of the few in their proper place in Scotland, which is a rung below the level at which meaningful political discourse starts.