Douglas Ross to resign as leader of Scottish Conservatives

Mixed feelings here, as Ross has long been a liability for the Scottish Tories for a variety of reasons. These include a poisonously unattractive public persona, his juggling three jobs (as a professional assistant football referee, an MP and an MSP, while doubling as Scottish Tory leader) and doing none of them well, arrant hypocrisy and screeching U-turns as he's sought to ingratiate himself with a sorry succession of UK Tory leaders, and his cloddish, utterly juvenile misbehaviour during proceedings at the Holyrood parliament.

I could write far more about his personal character and haplessness as a politician than I suspect anyone here's attention span might cope with (grimly amusing as much of it is), so I'll let co-leader of the Scottish Greens Patrick Harvie reflect general sentiments about the asshole:



To sum up, Ross's hold on his party in Scotland has long seemed very tenuous. By shoving aside an unwell relatively popular Tory MP (who was intent on standing and is expected to make a full discovery) so that Ross could take over the candidacy for what has been a relatively "safe" seat for the Tories, depriving the previous MP of a redundancy payoff if the seat had been lost, but rendering Ross eligible to collect it if he crashes and burns, he royally pissed off party workers to such an extent that they revealed 28 allegedly fraudulent expense claims as an MP for travel necessary for his assistant referee duties, this on top of an existing rumbling scandal over some £30,000 of income from his refereeing that he failed to declare for tax (one of his various excuses being that he thought he didn't need to declare it because he'd donated it to charity - not a grasp of tax laws you'd hope to see from a party leader).

If any of this stirs a glimmer of sympathy, save it for a more deserving candidate - Ross has been at the forefront of calling for various resignations at the drop of a hat ever since he elbowed the previous Scottish Tory leader aside and jumped into his shoes.

The visuals couldn't be much worse for Tory spin doctors to try to knit into their Scottish campaign. If successful at the election, he's chosen to retain his seat as an MP (no doubt because it pays better than an MSP and gives him more scope for arselicking his way up the party career ladder, having reached the top rung in Scotland) and ditch his commitment to Holyrood. If he loses as an MP, his Holyrood seat seems to be seen as a consolation prize, and a poor second at that.