In Douglas Ross's successor constituency, Tory luck may have run out

VOTERS in this new constituency may be rather puzzled as to why the incumbent MP for the predecessor seat of Moray, the Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross, has abandoned them and decided to stand elsewhere.

It’s possible that some of them may harbour the unworthy suspicion that it was simply because the Tories’ first-choice candidate didn’t become ill and give Ross the chance to heroically step in and replace her.

But this is not the first time he has turned his back on his home patch. After he became leader in 2020, he needed to find a route back into the Scottish Parliament, and the most obvious way would have been to stand in the equivalent Holyrood constituency of Moray, where he had been the Tory candidate in 2016.

The snag was that at Holyrood level, Moray had been SNP-held since the start of devolution in 1999, and he would have needed to overturn an SNP majority of almost 3000 votes. Ross might have lost and for a party leader that would have been downright embarrassing.

So he played it safe and got himself a plum spot on the Tories’ Highlands and Islands list. Based on that precedent, local voters can be reassured that Ross’ motivation for avoiding this year’s contest in the UK Parliament constituency is likely to be no more complicated than a simple desire to avoid defeat.

If he’d wanted to replace Tory candidate Kathleen Robertson, he has demonstrated he would have been more than capable of dreaming up a pretext. And any concerns he had about losing may have been well-founded, because not only was his winning margin from 2019 a very modest 1.1%, but boundary changes have also been significant enough to transform the seat into one that is notionally held by the SNP.

(Image: UK Parliament)

The Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey areas have all come in from the safe SNP seat held by Drew Hendry (above). Nevertheless, if Ross had been serious in his claim to be intervening in the General Election to “lead from the front” and use his status as leader to help his party win a seat they might otherwise lose, Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey could have been the ideal choice, because although he would have faced an uphill struggle, there are several factors that ought to make the seat winnable for the Tories.

An exceptionally large 21% of its residents are English-born, a higher proportion than even in Dumfries and Galloway, for example, and considerably higher than in any of the other SNP-Tory marginal seats in the north-east.

The Moray Council area voted against independence by a margin of 58% to 42%, bigger than the national average, and 60% of the population of the new constituency report having an exclusively Scottish national identity, five percentage points lower than the nationwide figure. Perhaps most significantly of all, Moray was one of the very few parts of Scotland where the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum was genuinely competitive and almost won a majority.

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Disproportionately low levels of pro-Europeanism were arguably the decisive factor in Ross keeping the Tory-to-SNP swing in the old Moray seat down to less than 4% in 2019, below the national average of 6%, allowing him to cling on.

But Moray is also one of the paradoxical locations which are basically anti-independence but where the SNP still have deep roots. Winnie Ewing won the old Moray and Nairn seat twice in the 1970s, and then her daughter-in-law Margaret Ewing gained the replacement Moray seat back from the Tories in 1987. It was subsequently retained by the SNP for 30 consecutive years.

The 2019 election was a unique example in the last half-century of the Tories having a poor Scotland-wide result but still managing to win Moray. Now that Brexit has drifted down the list of voters’ priorities, and particularly now that the latest YouGov poll shows the Tories on just 11% of the Scottish vote, their luck may be about to run out.

Nothing is certain given that the SNP’s own vote is under pressure, but the most likely outcome would appear to be that Graham Leadbitter will reclaim one of his party’s most cherished former heartlands.