Quintin Jardine's blog

Scotland waits with bated breath this afternoon as the votes that will determine the new leader of the Scottish Conservative Party are counted. Can you feel the tension? No, I thought not. I suspect that very few of the 8,000 (are there that many left?) electors will have heard of all four of the candidates, and that the diehard tweed and twin-set rump of a party that once polled more that 50% of the popular vote in a Westminster election will not support any of them with enthusiasm. Although I no longer have a personal interest, I’d like to see Murdo Fraser win. The central plank of his platform is the dissolution of the party he strives to lead and its replacement with ‘something else’. The first part of that will be easily done; the truth is that rightly or wrongly, the Scottish public perception of Margaret Thatcher killed the Tory Party north of the border twenty years ago. The second part will be rather more difficult. Murdo seems not to have noticed that ‘something else’ already exists. It’s called the Scottish National Party.