THE Conservative leadership contest yesterday took a surprising turn which revealed that the lesson the Tories have learned from their defeat in July's Westminster General Election and the catastrophe of Liz Truss is that they are not sufficiently promoting their crazy authoritarian hard right tendencies.
Until yesterday there were three remaining leadership candidates, and it speaks volumes about the disconnect between the Conservative Party and reality that of the three, former Home Secretary James Cleverly was regarded as the moderate centrist.
Many Scottish Tory MSPs had backed Tom Tugendhat, a former member of the armed forces, who had pitched himself as the candidate of public service and was much more centrist than the rest of the pack.
Tugendhat was the first to drop out after MPs voted.
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During his speech to the Conservative Party conference, Cleverly stressed the need for the Tories to be more normal.
Cleverly was backed by former Scottish Tory leader and erstwhile darling of the Scottish media Ruth Davidson.
But the Tories listened to Cleverly's sage advice not to go off into the deep end of hard right English nationalist populism, and replied: "Wibble, wibble."
Yesterday, MPs chose to eliminate Cleverly from the contest, putting forward the hard right candidates Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick as the two who will go on the ballot to be voted upon by the party membership.
Both Badenoch and Jenrick represent the hard right English nationalist wing of the Conservative Party.
Badenoch has specialised in throwing petrol on the fires of the culture wars and earlier this year said: "We can't just accept devolution… we need to talk about rolling it back."
The Tories have always been hostile to devolution and the last Conservative government mounted a series of attacks on the devolution settlement, by passing and side-lining the Scottish Parliament and allowing Westminster to intervene directly on devolved matters.
The Labour government of Keir Starmer appears poised to continue this process but Badenoch threatens to turbo charge it and to actively seek to strip powers from the Scottish Parliament.
For his part Robert Jenrick bangs on in apocalyptic terms about the need to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which is apparently preventing the UK from being sufficiently cruel to migrants and asylum seekers.
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Reasonable people might assume that if your proposals for tackling immigration require tearing up British adherence to widely accepted international standards of human rights, then it's your immigration proposals which are the problem, not an international treaty on human rights which the UK was highly influential in designing.
But then if you are a reasonable person then you're not going to be a supporter of the hard right of the Conservative party.
Whichever of these two deeply unappealing individuals wins the support of the Tory party membership, the same people who thought Liz Truss would make a good prime minister, it presents a problem for Russell Findlay, the newly elected leader of the Scottish Tories.
Findlay is faced with Reform eating into the Conservatives' hard right anti-devolution support base in Scotland meaning that if he wants to improve on his party's position and avoid heavy losses in 2026's Scottish elections he is going to have to build a broader coalition of anti-independence support.
That means attracting Labour and Lib Dem voters in Scotland, who are unlikely to be attracted to a nakedly hard right English nationalist party which wants to roll back devolution and take the UK out of the ECHR.
The UK Conservative party has decided that the way to deal with the challenge posed to it in England by Nigel Farage is to cosplay Farage.
For all that Reform UK is being bigged up by sections of the Scottish media and, thanks to the broadly proportional electoral system used for Scottish Parliament elections, may succeed in electing some MSPs in 2026, its appeal in Scotland is considerably more limited than it is in England and the UK Conservatives tacking even further to the right significantly damages their election chances in Scotland.
The Council of Nations and Regions gives short shrift to Scotland
With Keir Starmer and the Labour Party plummeting in popularity with Anas Sarwar being forced to defend the policy decisions of a boss he is evidently unable to influence, and now the Tories completing their transition into a hard right nakedly English nationalist populist party, the July general election is increasingly looking like an electoral disaster which the SNP can recover from due to the missteps of its opponents.
In yet another unforced error on the part of Starmer which will do him no favours in Scotland, the first meeting of the Council of Nations and Regions in Edinburgh on Friday has been branded an "insult" to Scotland after it transpired that no Scottish representatives other than First Minister John Swinney would be in attendance.
It seems that in Starmer's eyes, the first minister of Scotland can be lumped together with English mayors.
It's all just "where you live" as far as Starmer is concerned, isn't it? Out beyond the M25.
Starmer promised that Scotland would be "the beating heart of his government" although the Scottish Government said it was not made aware of the council before an announcement was made by the UK Government.
Starmer's Chancellor gave the Scottish Government just 90 minutes notice of the axing of the universal winter fuel allowance even though it resulted in a loss of £160 million to the Scottish budget.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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