GRAHAM GRANT: Why DO the Tories keep stabbing their most successful party leaders in the back?

The SNP’s reverse Midas touch is contagious and now the Tories have caught the bug – at a moment of existential crisis.

With a little over three weeks until polling day, Douglas Ross has lobbed a hand grenade into a lacklustre campaign – by quitting.

He had previously pledged to leave the Commons and concentrate on leading the Tories at Holyrood, but performed a U-turn last week, sparking an internal backlash.

Now he will run for a Westminster seat in the North-East, after the incumbent candidate David Duguid was sacked because of ill health – though he insists he’s fit to stand.

It’s a shambles, and means that after the General Election the party will be plunged into a leadership contest, with no obvious successor lined up.

There’s no doubt it’s an unceremonious exit for a leader who deserves credit for taking the fight to the SNP with a refreshing bullishness that was sadly lacking in Jackson Carlaw, the man he replaced.

At the last Holyrood election in 2021, the Conservatives’ vote share was 22.7 per cent – up from 22.5 per cent in 2016 – with more than 1.2million Scots backing the party, an increase from just over 1million in the previous poll.

Crucially, Mr Ross deprived the SNP of the majority it craved and forced it into a doomed pact with the Greens.

That partnership ended in dramatic fashion this year with the defenestration of Humza Yousaf – who triggering his own downfall by ending the deal.

Mr Ross’s slow-burn strategy bore fruit over time – the independence cause was left in a cul-de-sac, contributing to the political demise of Nicola Sturgeon and then Mr Yousaf.

We shouldn’t underestimate Mr Ross’s achievement – two First Ministers consigned to the backbenches, and their mission to break up Britain on life support. 

His doggedness as he held the SNP to account week after week paid dividends, but as ever in politics you don’t always get credit for your successes – as Rishi Sunak has found to his cost.

And Mr Ross showed he was a man of principle in May 2020 – months before becoming leader – when he resigned as a Scotland Office minister over Dominic Cummings’s threadbare defence of his trip to County Durham during lockdown.

After taking over from Mr Carlaw, he was dealt a terrible hand during a tumultuous period dominated by the gruelling Brexit psychodrama – which the SNP exploited at every turn to push for independence.

He called for Boris Johnson to quit in January 2022 over Partygate – but wisely withdrew his demand weeks later when Russia invaded Ukraine.

All these variables could not have been foreseen, and Mr Ross negotiated the minefield for nearly four years with clear-sighted calm and steely conviction.

True, the optics of him supposedly shouldering aside a sick man to run for a Westminster seat were bad – but the truth is more complex, and party mandarins decided Mr Duguid could not stand, not Mr Ross.

John Swinney has attempted to make hay with the row by demanding minutes of the Tory management board’s meetings where the Duguid matter was discussed.

A call for transparency from the former Minister for Cover-Ups – who admitted manually deleting his Covid WhatsApp messages to Ms Sturgeon – is hard to take seriously. But the impending departure of Mr Ross will be a fillip for the First Minister.

Mr Swinney is far too deeply associated with the many failures of the Sturgeon reign to stay in charge in the longer term – a caretaker presiding over a badly fractured organisation, on its uppers amid an ongoing police fraud probe into its finances.

That makes Mr Ross’s shock announcement yesterday all the harder to stomach – with the SNP staring down the barrel of heavy losses on July 4, the Scottish Tories are in disarray.

And many of the errors, similar to those of Mr Sunak, have been self-inflicted.

The Tories should have been watching the implosion of the SNP, but instead they’ve decided to announce an imminent change of leader, in the middle of an election campaign.

Ruth Davidson quit in 2019 after eight years as Scottish Tory leader, partly because of the party’s civil war over Brexit. 

She had turned the Tories into the main opposition at Holyrood, and might have taken them into office if she’d stuck around – it would have been a big challenge, but not impossible.

The return of Ms Davidson to the Tory fold (now that Brexit has been resolved) seems unlikely, but then who expected to see Lord Cameron back in the saddle as Foreign Secretary – or Mr Swinney as First Minister?

Her star power could transform the electoral calculus, but it would take time – a commodity in short supply as the 2026 election looms.

Not much can be done to prevent anyone from leaving their job – and Ms Davidson had stuck it out for nearly a decade. But the ousting of Mr Johnson was an entirely avoidable outcome – one engineered for the most part by his own colleagues.

Of course he made big mistakes during Partygate, but he was a major asset who won an 80-seat majority in 2019, drawing a line under the toxic Brexit impasse which had paralysed politics for three years.

Now the Tories have a disaster-prone leader who has had to publicly insist that he won’t quit before July 4, though some of his many critics may have other ideas. 

The fact that the notion of replacing Mr Sunak in the midst of a campaign is even being considered tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of the Conservatives.

They’ve swapped a heavyweight who demolished the ‘red wall’ for a leader who’s more than 20 points behind Labour in the polls.

Labour has been comfortably ahead since the Liz Truss interregnum – another unforced error with calamitous consequences.

The content of her tax- cutting plan for bolstering growth was laudable, but its execution was a botched job of spectacular proportions.

Mr Sunak quickly stabilised the Conservatives, and the economy, though he had contributed to the chaos by conspiring against Mr Johnson in the first place.

The 2019 election should have paved the way for an economic revival once Brexit was done, but there have been countless missed opportunities to capitalise on that historic result.

Mr Ross’s decision to quit couldn’t have come at a worse time for a party which has been in the election winning business since the 1830s.

And while Tory triumph next month at a UK level seems highly unlikely, there is still time to turn the tanker around ahead of the next Holyrood poll.

To stand any chance of doing so, the new leader has to ensure the party stops being its own worst enemy and turns its fire on the SNP’s long record of failure.