The election leaflets are going to write themselves, aren’t they?
“I don’t think Douglas Ross is a big figure.”
“He’s in Elgin. LOL.”
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) January 12, 2022
The controversial journalist David Leask may be surprised to learn that I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history. But one thing I do know is that Bloody Sunday in 1905 was the pivotal moment when the populace started to see Tsarism for what it truly was. Until then they had believed that their suffering was the fault of the Tsar’s ministers and staff, who kept the truth from him. They honestly thought he loved his people so much that if he had known what was happening, he would have been deeply shocked and would have been bound to help. But when they attempted to petition him directly, they found he held them in exactly the same contempt and quickly ordered guns to be turned on them.
I suspect that, on a smaller scale, a number of Scottish Tories have had an equivalent epiphany over the last 24 hours. Until now, they’ve probably assumed that when the UK government sneer at the Scottish Government, the contempt is directed solely at the SNP and at Nicola Sturgeon – and that will always have seemed absolutely fine, because rank and file Scottish Tory members, and indeed Scottish Tory voters, wholeheartedly share that contempt. But suddenly they’ve been confronted with evidence that the contempt of London Tories is for Scotland and Scots as a whole, and that Scottish Tories are most certainly not exempt from it. At the first sign of the duly elected leader of the Scottish Conservative party asserting himself, the Westminster mask instantly slipped and Douglas Ross was derided as a lightweight, who cannot possibly be taken seriously because he was speaking in Elgin, not London but flipping Elgin, which is apparently not somewhere that serious people go to speak. So much for the pretty fiction that our imperial masters regard all the Tory towns of north-east Scotland as of equal value within #OurPreciousUnion to the gleaming metropolis.
Jacob Rees-Mogg went on to say that, although he has no time for the elected leader of the Scottish branch of his own party, he does regard the appointed Alister Jack as a more substantial figure. Now why would that be, I wonder? Perhaps because Jack went to the right sort of school (Glenalmond College) and speaks with the right sort of accent? Whereas Ross actually does come across as a common or garden Jock. He went to a state school and then studied at the Scottish Agricultural College – can you imagine? How frightful.
I can’t imagine that attitude going down well with most Scottish Tories – because after all Ross speaks like they do and Jack doesn’t.
