THE Scottish Tories should break away from the UK Conservative party after next year’s Holyrood election, according to the party’s former communications chief.
Andy Maciver made an appeal to Jackson Carlaw after a quarter of his shadow Cabinet broke ranks last week to call for Dominic Cummings to be sacked following his lockdown journey to Durham.
Conservative MSPs and MPs were flooded with complaints from constituents about the failure of the Prime Minister to sack his top aide who made the 260-mile journey from London. Cummings also confessed to a 60-mile round trip from Durham to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight during the lockdown.
“I know Jackson Carlaw well. I consider him a friend. I know what his words mean, and I know what his facial expressions mean. He is angry. Angry with Boris Johnson. Angry with Dominic Cummings. And he’ll be angry, again, the next time,” Maciver said in an article in The Herald.
“What should he do? One, use his influence to ensure Mr Johnson delivers a Brexit deal which works for Scotland. Two, get through the Holyrood election, with fingers crossed. Then, three, get the hell out of this political party.”
Maciver described the UK Conservatives as the Scottish Tories’ “Achilles’ heel” and warned they would never be able to get into power in Edinburgh if tied to them.
READ MORE: Jackson Carlaw accused of ‘outright lie’ in parliament row
“The Scottish Tories’ Achilles’ heel is back. In truth, it never goes away; it simply lurks, niggling, threatening, always ready to cause maximum damage at the worst possible time,” he wrote. “The Achilles’ heel is the Conservative Party in London. The topic, on this occasion, was the Dominic Cummings saga. It doesn’t really matter, though. It’s always something.”
Maciver has previously backed calls for a separate Scottish Tory party and supported Murdo Fraser’s proposals for the split in 2011 when he stood in the leadership election against Ruth Davidson.
Maciver suggests the Scottish Tories adopt a Canadian-style party structure where the Conservatives, Labour and the LibDems stand in Scotland for Westminster elections, but leave their sister independent parties to stand at Holyrood
After Davidson quit as leader last year the debate resurfaced. There was talk of an internal commission to consider four options: maintaining the status quo, changing the name of the party to distance it but keeping broadly the same links, setting up a Bavarian-style system in which two separate parties have a coalition agreement at Westminster, and an arrangement similar to that used by parties in Quebec, meaning that one would stand for the Scottish parliament and the other for the Commons.
But Carlaw dismissed the ideas saying the Scottish Tories had sufficient independence from the UK Tories.
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