With that paragraph Skelton – an obscure but nevertheless significant figure – contributed a memorable phrase and an enduring concept to the modern political lexicon. For Skelton, the Unionist MP for Perth in the 1920s and early ‘30s, the “property-owning democracy” was the cornerstone of what he called “Constructive Conservatism”, the most important component of the party’s “view of life”.

Later, this was interpreted to mean simply home ownership, characterised by Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of council house sales, although Skelton intended it to mean much more than that. He wanted individuals to have a stake in every layer of society, in government and industry as well as individual property. It was a remarkably influential idea. A trio of prime ministers – Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home – all pay homage to Skelton in their memoirs, while David Cameron is familiar with the phraseology, if not the man himself.

Skelton’s shrewd analysis of his political era also has much to teach the contemporary Conservative Party, not least its moribund northern outpost. Winning Perth for the first time in 1922, he told his constituents that the “future duty of Conservatives was clear”. “In a democracy their politics must be all pervading,” he said. “They must not only be Unionists on polling day but every day, and all the day.”

Skelton also realised that the party could not regard any system of government “as necessarily permanent or final”. If there was to be “some devolution, some alteration in the present system”, he said in the early 1930s, Scotland would “come to that new duty and that new responsibility not as a minor member, not as inferior to England; she will come to it with a full knowledge of Parliamentary life, and she will come because she is ready.”

He was, therefore, a Nationalist and a Unionist, Scottish and British, a useful political balancing act his successors have lost sight of, and much to their cost. “If Conservatives are not to fight with one hand tied behind their backs,” Skelton also proclaimed, “the active principles of Conservatism must be felt anew, thought anew, promulgated anew.” Not a bad mission statement for the modern Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.

Skelton believed in a holistic approach to politics, or a coherent “view of life”. That means Messrs Sanderson and Brownlee need to think beyond organisational tinkering and a new policy initiative here and there. The Scottish Conservative “view of life” has to permeate everything the party does, both politically and in terms of presentation.

What does that mean in practice? Skelton was the first to recognise the need for Conservatives to move beyond their traditional association with privilege and wealth, and although the party has made great strides in achieving this since the 1920s the perception, particularly in Scotland, is very different. The next Scottish Tory manifesto should, therefore, emphasise what Skelton characterised as “fair play between all classes and the desire of each to farther the common weal”. Skelton’s progressive Conservatism worked in the inter-war era and can, with a little refreshment, work again.

David Torrance’s biography, Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy, is available now from Biteback Publishing.

Such judgments would, of course, be premature, although initial indications suggest that he will become neither. Cameron’s deft handling of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, so badly mishandled by Heath in 1972, is proof enough that he does not share Ted’s lofty disdain for the sensitivities of Northern Ireland politics, while the Prime Minister’s softly-softly approach to public spending cuts is ostentatiously non-Thatcherite.

Heath, it should be remembered, once looked so promising, particularly when it came to the Scottish question. His surprise commitment to devolution at the so-called Declaration of Perth in 1968 not only captured the political initiative (if not the whole-hearted support of the Scottish Tory party) but marked a genuinely far-sighted departure in British constitutional politics. “It would have been politically suicidal”, wrote Heath in his memoirs, to have done anything less.

But, to quote Saint Matthew, “by their fruits ye shall know them”. In government, Heath’s devolution commitment did not bear fruit, but was instead crushed by ministerial inaction and the weight of more pressing matters. The real trouble, as Philip Ziegler observes in his new authorized biography of Heath, was that “privately he thought that the Assembly would be at worst mischievous, at best a waste of time and money”.

Therein lies a valuable lesson for Cameron: not only should he implement the Calman Commission’s recommendations swiftly and decisively, but he should demonstrate his commitment to Scottish affairs by going much further. As it stands, the proposal to give MSPs control over 10p within each income tax band is both financially dangerous and intellectual incoherent; if one accepts that the Scottish Parliament not raising the money it spends is a problem, then there is only one logical solution.

Thus Cameron should be bold where Heath faltered. Full fiscal autonomy (or “responsibility”, as a business-backed campaign would have it) offers the new Prime Minister the tantalising prospect of killing several political birds with one stone: making good on his promise to devolve genuine power to Holyrood, making a new best friend of Alex Salmond and, in the longer term, silencing the troublesome duo that is the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question.

Not only that, but Cameron would do well in taking personal charge of the reforms instead of leaving them, as Heath did, to his Secretary of State for Scotland, the eminently forgettable Gordon Campbell (who does not feature at all in either Heath’s memoirs or Zeigler’s biography). While Heath always felt ill at ease north of the border, Cameron – as his relaxed visit to Holyrood shortly after becoming premier demonstrated – does not.

So he should sell “Calman plus”, and sell it well, presenting it as a constructive Conservative move sheltering underneath a Unionist umbrella. It would also prevent Cameron from falling into a Heath-like sulk when it comes to the attitude of the Scots. Heath is said to have been furious when they returned a mere 23 Scottish Tory MPs at the 1970 general election. Cameron has just one, not to mention a Scotland Office conveniently stuffed full of Liberal Democrats. Calman, therefore, also presents an opportunity to wrestle Scottish affairs back onto Conservative territory.

It will not, of course, be that easy, and Cameron’s best intentions – like Heath’s in 1972/73 – could easily be overtaken by what Harold Macmillan called “events, dear boy, events”. The current Prime Minister faces economic challenges that make Heath’s pale into comparison, although there is little prospect of today’s Government being brought down by striking miners. Nevertheless, when political times are tough, time-consuming constitutional reform quite naturally drops down the prime ministerial to-do list.

All the more reason, therefore, for Cameron to be decisive where Heath was cautious, radical where Heath was technocratic. By pursuing comprehensive (and sincere) fiscal devolution, he could become the great reforming prime minister that Heath never was. By his legislative fruits Cameron shall be known, and nowhere is that more true than in Scotland.

DAVID TORRANCE

ENDS

And although the recent appointment of Tory grandee Lord Sanderson to chair a review of the Scottish Tory Party’s “structures, functions and operational activity” (not, as has been widely reported, its future direction) may appear to be a response of sorts, it is in fact an excuse to do nothing at all. The commission’s recommendations have already been decided; Sanderson and his compatriots (including Sunday’s desperate addition of Lord Forsyth) simply exist to add a consultative veneer to the whole shoddy process.

And was there a single peep from any of the sixteen Conservative MSPs at Holyrood, few (if any) of whom seem to have been consulted about Sanderson’s appointment? Not at all, or at least not on the record. As usual, they simply stood idly by and took what was doled out to them from Conservative Central Office, now housed in two dusty rooms on a dusty street in Edinburgh’s New Town.

In fact, the notion that these elected members have any degree of control of the party has been well and truly blown out of the water since the general election. Instead, the party chairman – the nice but ineffectual Andrew Fulton – and his colleague (and, in truth, his boss) Mark McInnes, director of the Scottish party, are now contriving to wield absolute power, over candidate selection, organisation and, to all intents and purposes, the MSPs themselves. It is no mistake that McInnes decided the membership of Sanderson’s commission, of which he is also secretary.

The lack of formal challenge to this power grab is astonishing. A recent election debriefing is a case in point. A Tory MSP tells me that McInnes provided the group with lots of devastating insights like “we didn’t do well because we underestimated the number of people who are anti-Tory”, while paradoxically predicting that next year’s Holyrood election would add a few more Members to their ranks. Except in Glasgow, where Bill Aitken was informed of imminent defeat and thus announced his retirement the following day.

Indeed, instead of concentrating minds, the 2011 Scottish Parliament election is simply prolonging Tory agony. It cannot, so the feeble argument goes, possibly do anything radical over the next few months because with another campaign imminent it would be politically unwise. The trouble is that this analysis will probably apply in the wake of each subsequent election result. After 2011 it will be local authority elections, after that the Euro poll, and after that another general election.

And thus the once-mighty Scottish Conservative Party stumbles complacently into further decline. The charming Annabel Goldie is now (and I have for long defended her leadership against its sillier detractors) irredeemably part of the problem. She is conservative with a big “C”, to the extent that she cannot contemplate change no matter how grim the context. She is clearly in denial, thus her astonishing proclamation shortly after the election that the Tory campaign “had won a lot of praise” as had her role within it.

It has also become embarrassingly clear that David Cameron, who has tried hard in Scotland since becoming leader in 2005, has simply given up on his ancestral land. The Scottish question, in his eyes, has been answered by stuffing the Scotland Office full of Liberal Democrats, and who can blame him. The once effective cry of “no mandate” from the SNP has been stifled, and the Prime Minister can get on with governing the rest of the country.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. There exists within the group at least a trio of sharper, younger MSPs who realise instinctively what needs to be done: chiefly an all-out drive for full fiscal responsibility (what could be more Tory?), a more radical edge to wider policy, and a change in elected (and, for that matter, non-elected) personnel which was only hinted at in a recent reshuffle.

Yet even within that group there is reticence, a fear of upsetting the applecart when it clearly needs to be overturned. Alas this is nothing new. Tories with a long memory will recall a similar period of angst in the mid-1960s, when declining electoral fortunes and organisational malaise led Young Turks like George Younger, Teddy Taylor and Alick Buchanan-Smith to take the party by the scruff of the neck.

I remember a depressing feeling of familiarity when I stumbled across a letter to Younger, about whom I was writing a biography, from a former Scottish Tory official called Ian McIntyre. Not only did he lambast the lack of an ‘effective or credible Chairman’ in Central Office, but attacked amateurish organisation and the party’s basic ‘lack of credibility’ in Scotland. ‘There comes a point beyond which’, he told Younger, ‘it becomes tedious and embarrassing to be associated with failure on the Scottish Tory scale.’

That was in 1966, when the Conservatives had lost four of their 24 Scottish MPs at a general election. Senior figures considered this to be evidence of terminal decline – oh what the party would give for 20 seats today! That result did, however, instigate action and by the 1979 election the party had increased its share of the vote, and even its number of MPs, following nearly two decades of drift and decline.

So it is not impossible to turn things around, although I doubt Tory MSPs or party officials even want to try. Oliver Brown memorably remarked that following the 1967 Hamilton by-election a shiver rang along the Labour front bench looking for a spine to run up. A shiver also runs along the Conservative benches at Holyrood, but has discovered no outlet; it shivers still, and will grow more violent and damaging until it does.

During a memorable exchange at Prime Minister’s Questions back in April 1983 Denis Healey accused Mrs Thatcher of being ‘frightened’ about the verdict of the electorate. ‘Afraid? Frightened? Frit?’ she stormed, deploying her native Lincolnshire dialect. ‘Could not take it? Cannot stand it?’ I’m afraid the same is now true of certain Conservative MSPs. They too are afraid, frightened, or indeed ‘frit’, and for that they have only themselves to blame.

DAVID TORRANCE

ENDS

Fittingly, perhaps, the most recent Public Finance magazine has an excellent article by David Scott on the post of Scottish Secretary, in which I am quoted.

A motion prompted by the SNP’s unhappiness and Sunny Jim’s inability to deliver devolution to Scotland, Foot said that no matter how misguided Donald Stewart, the SNP’s Westminster leader, ‘may be if he adheres to his apparent resolution to vote in the Lobby with those who are most bitterly opposed to the establishment of a Scottish Assembly, hon. Members who heard his speech must acknowledge the remarkable allegiance that the right hon. Gentleman commands from his followers. It is one of the wonders of the world. There has bean nothing quite like it since the armies of ancient Rome used to march into battle. It is only now that we see the right hon. Gentleman in his full imperial guise. Hail Emperor, those about to die salute you.’ As Callaghan remarked in his own contribution to the debate, the SNP Members were like turkeys voting for an early Christmas.

Foot then turned, most memorably, to David Steel, the youthful leader of the Liberals, who also proposed to vote with the Conservatives and against the Labour government. ‘What the right hon. Lady has done today is to lead her troops into battle snugly concealed behind a Scottish nationalist shield, with the boy David holding her hand.’ Steel, he added, had ’passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever’.

The always-eloquent Foot had good Scottish credentials. His mother was the daughter of a Scottish doctor named Mackintosh – Foot always stressed this as his middle name on visits to Scotland – while his brother, the improbably named Dingle Foot, was the Liberal MP for Dundee between 1931-45. Last, but by no means least, Foot, as Lord President of the Council in the ill-fated Labour governments of the late 1970s, was in charge of the equally ill-fated devolution legislation for Scotland and Wales. With his keen sense of history, Foot feared that by not devolving power to the Celtic fringe then the UK government risked repeating its mistakes in Ireland a century before.

FULSOME press coverage, enthusiastic crowds and increased political support – that is how Scotland must have appeared to Margaret Thatcher as she negotiated her first year as Prime Minister 30 years ago. But newly released private papers also reveal signs that the honeymoon would not last long.

Although the Conservatives had gained six new Scottish MPs and increased their share of the vote to more than 30 per cent, Scotland’s economy was on the verge of a deep recession and the political battle lines over the constitution, industry and what became known as “Thatcherism” were already being drawn.

Among the papers – hundreds of which have been made public by Cambridge University’s Churchill Archives Centre – is a wistful letter from Teddy Taylor, who would have become Mrs Thatcher’s first Scottish Secretary had he not lost his Cathcart constituency to Labour at the 1979 general election.

Offering “a few thoughts on the Scottish scene and the election result”, Taylor expresses disappointment that the Conservatives made no impact on the Labour vote in west and central Scotland. “The Labour Party ran a furious campaign to imply that there would be a jobs collapse if the Conservatives were to be elected and cut off aid”, he wrote, “and there was also the implication that we didn’t care about Scotland We tried to counter it…But we didn’t succeed.”

Taylor then warned the Prime Minister that this “basic problem could be the beginning of a Labour campaign in opposition”, particularly against the closure of Clyde shipyards, which would soon run out of work. Taylor wrote that without an appropriate gesture, “Labour could run a simple campaign on the basis that Labour kept the shipyards open and the Conservatives closed them down!”

Taylor – who returned to the House of Commons as the MP for Southend East in 1980 – also expresses reservations about the government’s plans to sell off council houses. “If we are going to change the face of Scottish housing,” he wrote, “I think that it is vital that we sell some houses and flats in the more difficult areas. Otherwise they will become massive ghettoes.”

He concluded by telling Mrs Thatcher that he had decided not to attend the Scottish Tory conference in Perth the following week, fearing that he would be “a distraction and minor embarrassment”, with the media focussing on “the human interest aspect of the ‘sad man’ when all attention should be paid to the optimism and hope of a new Prime Minister and a new team.”

Preparations for the 1979 Scottish Conservative conference, at which Mrs Thatcher made her first public speech as Prime Minister, also feature in the declassified papers. Enthusiastic Tories mobbed her at the Station Hotel in Perth, while one young activist even presented her with a “blue Tory rabbit” to celebrate the election victory.

But one spectator was less than amused. Mrs Rachel Drew wrote to complain that Mrs Thatcher “could have spared a moment to pause and give a wave of the hand in greeting to the patient people – it would have been greatly appreciated. As an Englishwoman living in Scotland I sense the atmosphere at times and this greeting would have been welcome.”

Generally, however, the new Prime Minister’s reception in Scotland was favourable. Sending copies of uniformly positive press coverage following the conference visit, a Downing Street aide attached a note which read: “You will notice that for once, at least, the Glasgow Herald coverage is fulsome.”

The Prime Minister’s next visit to Scotland was scheduled for 11 July, although advisers feared that this might be “an unfortunate time to be seeking to turn public attention to Scotland” as the repeal of the Scotland Act – which would have established a devolved Scottish Assembly – was also scheduled to take place in the House of Commons that day.

In the event, the repeal debate took place two weeks earlier and the Scottish visit went ahead as planned, although a proposed tour of St Andrew’s House – the Edinburgh HQ of the Scottish Office – also proved politically sensitive. While Mrs Thatcher would meet union representatives, she was advised to “avoid a separate special meeting with union representatives: there are still difficulties in the Scottish Office in the aftermath of the Civil Service industrial action earlier in the year.”

Finally, it fell to Mrs Thatcher to appoint a new chairman of the Scottish Development Agency (SDA, later Scottish Enterprise); an interventionist government body many Scottish Tory MPs wanted to abolish altogether. Lewis Robertson, the serving chief executive, was considered too close to “the old SDA which the Party disliked”, so the Prime Minister opted for Robin Duthie, the chairman of tent supplier Black and Edgington, whose “commercial experience” was considered “essential”.

This was probably an appointment Mrs Thatcher came to regret. Two years later, Duthie likened her government’s monetarist economic policy to a “blunt instrument”.

Indications that Scotland was not warming to Mrs Thatcher came in November 1979 when the Conservative Research Department sent the prime minister a summary of opinion polling since the election. While this was good across much of the country, a party official warned that “support for the Conservatives in Scotland is continuing to drop, whilst support for Labour is increasing at the expense of both the Conservatives and SNP”.

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation and Churchill Archives Centre intend to digitise all of the former Prime Minister’s official and private files, many of which can already be viewed at www.margaretthatcher.org.

ENDS