Well, this election has produced two clear winners, Boris Johnson in England and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, and two clear losers, Jeremy Corbyn everywhere and, in Scotland, Boris Johnson. In England and , to a lesser extent, Wales, the election has been a triumph for the Conservative Party. The slogans “Get Brexit Done” and “Vote for Boris and keep Corbyn out of Number 10” have won the election with a little bit of help from Nigel Farage whose Brexit Party took enough Labour votes in some Leave-leaning constituencies to enable the Tories to win the seat.
In Scotland it was very different. The Conservatives went into the election holding 13 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats; they lost 7 of them. Even more distressingly, their spirits and hopes had risen in the course of the campaign. A few hours before the poll Ruth Davidson, till recently the party leader in Scotland, named three more seats they were in contention to win. In one sense, Johnson himself shouldn’t be blamed for the Tory failure in Scotland; the Scottish Party mostly kept quiet about him. Although, oddly, Ruth Davidson, a fierce critic of Johnson in the past, said in that last-minute intervention that she had found “strong support for him from some aspirational working-class voters across Scotland.” Be that as it may, the Tories flopped and have ended with only two more seats in Scotland than the Liberal Democrats who hold four despite their leader Jo Swinson being defeated in her own constituency.
