After stopping for a quick coffee pit stop in the vibrant Perthshire town of Auchterarder during the final hours of Holyrood election campaigning, Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay posed for a selfie next to an appropriate sign he encountered, which stated ‘nearly there’.
While Scots going to the polls on Thursday will mark the end point of a long slog of a campaign that appears to have failed to capture the imagination of many voters, some political commentators have speculated that it could also trigger the end of Mr Findlay’s own short reign as leader.
With current polling indicating that the Tories could slide from being the largest rival to the SNP to fourth or even fifth place, some have placed him as a frontrunner on resignation watch this weekend.
Mr Findlay is, though, having none of it and emphatically insists he is going nowhere regardless of the election result.
Kemi Badenoch is leading the UK-wide fightback after the party’s worst ever general election result in 2024, and some Tory insiders privately acknowledge that a good result in the Holyrood vote would be avoiding the worst ever performance since devolution — just 15 seats under Annabel Goldie in 2011.
But is Mr Findlay still committed to the job even if the party does hit rock bottom? ‘Yeah, completely,’ he says.
‘There are all sorts of potential outcomes, but having lost the general election in 2024 less than a year and a half ago, there is no assumption from us on our part that the trajectory for us from there was upwards. We knew that we had a lot of long-term work to rebuild that public trust.
‘I’m in it for the long haul. I’ll be in this job for as long as I think, and others think, I can make a difference.
‘I think both Kemi and I have steadied the ship. There was lots of experts telling us that the Tories after the general election were dead, that there was no point. But I tell you I speak to both Conservative party members and voters who tell us that we have never been more important, I recognise that we’ve never been more important.
‘You’ve got extremists like the Greens, populists like the SNP and Reform promising all sorts of things that they can’t deliver, and then in the middle is us — the credible, centre-right party of aspiration, party of hard work, party of personal responsibility.
‘So I’m in it for the long term, Kemi’s in it for the long term. These extremists will burn bright and then fade fairly quickly. We cannot abandon the pitch — it’s more important than it has ever been.’
So he’s not going to be resigning come Saturday morning? ‘Not a chance,’ Mr Findlay says with a steely stare.
Across the UK, the Tories have felt the wrath of voters when they fell to a worst ever result in the last general election.
A detailed More in Common poll at the weekend projected that the Scottish Tories could fall to just 12 seats.
But Mr Findlay, a former investigative journalist who only became an MSP five years ago, shrugs off the level of anxiety the election campaign and the gloomy polls have caused him.
‘I’m not anxious, I’m determined,’ he says. ‘I’m not a worrier.
‘As a journalist I took on organised crime gangs head to head, not because it was the easy thing to do — it was very difficult and it was risky. These criminals use blue chip lawyers to kill stories and they use threats to try and kill stories about activities.
‘So when I see polls saying that things are tough for us, or I hear these self-satisfied commentators telling us not to bother because we are irrelevant that just makes me even more determined.’
That 2011 all-time low triggered the election of a new-to-politics young leader in the shape of Ruth Davidson who then began turning the party’s fortunes around over time.
Like the young Ms Davidson 15 years ago, Mr Findlay believes that he is only in the early stages of turning the party’s fortunes around. That begins with acknowledging mistakes in the past.
He said: ‘People across the United Kingdom lost faith in us, we lost our way, we let people down. Unlike the SNP, our party is willing to hold up its hands and admit that. We are honest people, we admit where we get things wrong and we will continue to be contrite.
‘But people don’t want us to be in a perpetual state of angst about that, they want to see us doing what we do best and that is representing mainstream Britain.’
He has put in the mileage in the final week of the campaign. Perthshire on Tuesday, the North East, South Scotland, Edinburgh as he makes a personal plea to potential voters to back the Tories on the list rather than Reform.
Mr Findlay believes the SNP were ‘the original populists’, and Reform are now taking a similar approach to help its levels of support soar.
He says Reform ‘have some extremist positions’, but highlights differing positions among senior figures on issues like the mass deportation of migrants, while there have also been mixed messages on independence.
Mr Findlay said: ‘They will say anything. They pretend to be unionist to unionist voters but there’s a nudge and a wink to nationalist voters. That’s what they are doing — they are playing a two-faced game.
‘But it is not just a game, it’s so dangerous. Because with this disillusionment in politics the SNP should be out on their ear but they look like they could win, John Swinney says, a majority — and that is aided and abetted by Nigel Farage and Lord Offord.
‘We need to stop them. We need to persuade sensible Scots. I get it, I understand why you’re pissed off, I understand why things feel like nothing will change. But we are the party that can stand up to the SNP, we always have been and we will continue to do so. Nigel Farage does not give a monkeys about the Union or Scotland.’
He claims that being replaced by Reform as the largest opposition would be a ‘nightmare’ because it would ensure SNP victory, and said: ‘What will happen in all likelihood is this incoherent group of individuals will soon find out the reality that being in Holyrood is difficult and frustrating, and you can’t wave a magic wand and suddenly that’s it fixed.
‘I think many of them will lose interest very quickly because they realise it’s hard, and I think many of them will fall out with each other — they already are, you see it every other day. They’re not serious, they are people that are playing at politics.’
If the SNP fails to win a majority, Mr Findlay is still concerned about the alternative of an SNP/Green alliance. He said: ‘I remember when I was a journalist I once was sent out undercover to buy what was apparently a snuff movie from the Barras market in Glasgow, and that was even less gruesome than the thought of “Bute House 2 — The Return”.’
But given the concerns about an SNP majority, an SNP/Green alliance and Reform as the opposition, what is the alternative? What does he want to happen?
While he insists that he ‘will never support an SNP government or an SNP First Minister’, he refuses to speculate on who else he might support in any vote to be the next First Minister.
On whether he would support a Labour First Minister, he says he doesn’t want to say how he would act depending on potential outcomes.
He said: ‘I am here to fight our corner, and to get as many of us back into Holyrood as possible, and then we make a decision, and then we collectively sit down and look at our numbers and look at the other numbers and have some serious conversations about what that means.
‘But we will be nobody’s pawns, we will be as strong, as resilient and as determined as we’ve been in Holyrood, as we’ve ever been.’
And what about supporting a Reform First Minister? ‘It seems very, very unlikely,’ he said. ‘I cannot support a party that one, most importantly, isn’t a Unionist party, despite what they say, and two, it’s stated intent is to destroy our party.’
But what if the choice is Malcolm Offord or John Swinney? Mr Findlay said: ‘I don’t think that’s at all likely. But again what we will do is look at the outcome, which is obviously yet to happen, and at that point have these tough conversations.
‘But the primary thing for me, as someone who has suffered and seen the suffering caused by the SNP’s incompetence, waste, sleaze, inability to deliver, is to get them out.’
