The Scottish Tories have elected a new leader. After the dithering under the former leader Douglas Ross, the new leadership campaign and election got underway. The result was declared today with Russell Findlay MSP announced as the winner.

His credentials as a former investigative journalist were noted in the media, with the BBC report saying that he is fearless and dogged, deeply principled in exposing wrong-doing even among lawyers and judges. He is credited with saying that he thought politics was a bigger vehicle of change than journalism. I have heard others say that culture is even faster than politics and we have seen politicians move in the opposite direction into the media sphere. Further, Findlay has his own blog but he has not been active on it for some years. Be that as it may, I wish him well in attempting to sort out the wrong-doing in Scottish public life.

The contest brought to the fore his defeated opponent Murdo Fraser MSP. I wonder how many people realise that Strathnairn in the Scottish Highlands has produced significant political material in recent years.

After her first stymied attempt to become leader of the Scottish National Party, Kate Forbes MSP is now the Deputy First Minister of Scotland. She is a Forbes from Strathnairn. Following in her wake is Murdo Fraser MSP who had his second attempt at being the leader of his party. After the leadership race was whittled down to three from six, when three contenders threw in their lot with Fraser, who also wooed the former Scottish leader Douglas Ross on his path to the podium, he fell short of the target. Are these “also rans” failing at the last hurdle because of their evangelical Christian credentials?

Finally, there is “yours truly”, the leader of the Scottish Christian Party “Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship”, who spent six years in Strathnairn, preaching the Christian Gospel to Murdo Fraser, his parents and to some of Kate Forbes’ relatives; she did not live in the Strath at that time.

Yet all three Christians have a different political vision. Forbes and many SNP Christians view the SNP as the way forward for Christianity in Scotland. However, this vision became a nightmare when the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon followed the Green Party’s gender agenda and thereby lost credibility for the SNP and its hegemony in Scotland.

Fraser is a traditional Tory who looks back with longing to the 1955 Tory hegemony in Scotland. Since then Tory support has declined in Scotland and Margaret Thatcher’s trial of the Poll Tax in Scotland enabled the anti-Tory forces to muster. In the recent two decades SNP supporters labelled Toryism as such a toxic brand in Scotland that Fraser advocated separating the Scottish Tories from UK Tory dominance. This cost him the Scottish leadership to Ruth Davidson in 2011 who was supported by Prime Minister David Cameron who preferred Davidson’s opinions on gender rather than Fraser’s Christianity. Fraser declined to serve under Davidson and in 2019 he was still advocating separation of the Scottish Tories from the UK Conservative Party. Did this cost Fraser the leadership spot, or was it his evangelical Christianity? Davidson and David Mundell endorsed Findlay.

One may hope that Forbes’ high-profile role and Fraser’s Christianity will ameliorate the toxic label attached to Scottish Toryism, but it continues south of the border, and there is no suggestion yet that Fraser has changed his mind from his former view that a Christian Party is dangerous. His current politics is “liberal conservatism”. As leader of the Scottish Christian Party, I prefer Christian politics, which is best advocated through a Christian Party. I wish we had six Christian political parties in Scotland, but meanwhile there is one.