Douglas Ross: You can’t survive a bad election result, whether it’s your fault or not

The former Scottish Conservative leader on why he’s ditching Holyrood and aiming for a return to Westminster, in his own words...

“I have become growingly frustrated with the Scottish Parliament, with the setup here. A quarter of a century on from devolution, I don’t think it’s meeting the aspirations of people who voted for it in 1997, and I don’t think it has evolved and adapted as well as it could. I don’t think our level of debate here is anywhere near as high as it is in Westminster. I could pick politicians from every party in Westminster who can rise to the debate and really capture what’s being said and catch the attention of other politicians listening – that very rarely, if ever, happens in Holyrood.

“It’s a parliament, it is not a library. We’re not elected here to all get on with each other and be best friends. In fact, I think that’s one of the problems of this parliament. With it being small, people think they’ve got to be friends with everyone else. I’ll never know because I’ll never be friends with everyone in Scottish politics, but for some it’s an easier life if they’re friends with people across the political spectrum so they can go for a drink with anyone after work, they can meet them in the canteen.

“I really don’t care about that. I’d rather we have a proper, robust debate and get to the best solution. If everyone’s agreeing with each other, you’ll never get that. That will only help the government because people aren’t willing to put their head above the parapet and ask a difficult, challenging question. Which is why many of them will be glad to see the back of me, I’m sure.

“I’ve had a perfectly good relationship with Alison Johnstone [the presiding officer] until relatively recently. She takes her view and I take my view, and they’re very different. But when we have a situation where the government has so much control, I believe we need a strong presiding officer to assist those not in government to get answers.

“I feel at times the default of people in positions of responsibility, be it the presiding officer or some of the people advising her, is for everything to be calm and quiet – therefore they don’t take a risk by granting this urgent question or demanding this statement. Calm and quiet only helps the government. It doesn’t help the opposition, and it doesn’t aid scrutiny.

“Our committees have not acted as they should. I think they have been a real weakness in this parliament, where we have no revising chamber. We need our committees to do far more in the scrutiny of government and of the organisations that are associated with our portfolios. I would hope some people might say in the future, ‘don’t worry about asking challenging, robust questions because the education committee, when Douglas Ross convened it, did that and got some quite decent results’.

“Whatever the history books write about me – and it’ll be a very small footnote somewhere, I’m sure it won’t get a huge amount of coverage – what we did as a party in 2021 was stop what everyone thought was the unstoppable: Nicola Sturgeon getting her mandate, a majority, to get a second independence referendum. I’m very proud that we were able to stop that.

“I’m less proud that these last five years have been wasted by the government because they didn’t park it to one side and concentrate on other things. They have continued to agitate for independence.

“There is a lot that I would have done differently as leader. I didn’t do as much of the interpersonal things with colleagues, and that came up with what colleagues were saying at the time I left, and before I left. I could have and should have – and I tried at times – walked the floors. But the emails start piling up and the reports you’ve got to read are on your desk and such like, and you lose a bit of focus. I wish I’d done more of that because this is a group – some of them I was elected with for the first time in 2016, others came in when I was leading in 2021 – it’s a good group. I wish I’d spent a bit more time with them when I was leader.

“I could see the way things were going in 2024. I had in my mind at the start of the campaign, if it was going to be really challenging and difficult then I probably wasn’t going to be leader towards the end of the year. You can’t survive a bad result, whether it’s your fault or not.

“What happens at a UK level has a huge impact, whether you like it or not, here in Scotland… Eighteen months ago, Anas Sarwar had to do nothing and he would walk into Bute House if you listened to anyone in Scottish Labour. Look at where they are now.

“What’s interesting is the SNP position at the moment, because everyone thinks they’ve had a revival under John Swinney. No, they’ve not. If I have to predict the election today, based on current opinion polling, the SNP will continue to be the biggest party in Holyrood but with their lowest ever vote share. As the governing party, that is not an endorsement of John Swinney’s leadership or of the SNP over the last almost two decades. It’s an indication of a split opposition.

“There’s a real issue with people being scunnered with all politicians. There are people who will vote for Reform in May that have voted Conservative, have voted Labour, Lib Dem, SNP and probably even some Greens, because they think they’re all as bad as each other so this new party can’t be any worse than we’ve had in the past.

“But I also think that there’s a cohort of people that have been so put off by politics that they’ve stayed at home for a long time. What we’re seeing with an increase in Reform support is people who’ve never voted before. They’ve never had a party, in their view, that is going to do something wildly different because they think all the parties are roughly the same and they believe Nigel Farage is going to do something wildly different.

“I don’t. I’ve seen nothing in their policy announcements that suggests to me Reform in Scotland or at the UK level are going to be significantly different. I think they speak a good game, but I’ve got nothing to look at policy-wise that would suggest they would implement much different from what other parties have tried to do with devolution since 1999.

“The one thing we don’t have with Reform yet is them being tested during an election. They have performed well in by-elections… What we haven’t seen is them defending a slate of candidates right across the country who will all have to back the policies of the party.

“One of their challenges will be party discipline, what they do when they come up against difficult situations with their candidates. Every party has them, so there’s no way Reform will be immune from that. How they handle the scrutiny of being challenged at hustings, at TV debates, manifesto launches, do their sums add up? That’s what we’ve not experienced yet, and I think that will be quite telling.

“Another area I regret, where I could have maybe done things differently, was the Right to Recovery Bill… People went into that debate with their preconceived view that they weren’t going to support the bill. It didn’t matter if you had the best speech in the world, it wasn’t going to change any opinions. So maybe if you go back a few stages, get a more balanced set of [committee] witnesses, have a more balanced committee report, you might have a more balanced debate, and we could still be on track to introduce a legal obligation for people to get treatment that clearly they need.”