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Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode,

we'll be looking at the rebirth of the Scottish Tories. We'll also be asking whether it's

helpful to call Marine Le Pen a fascist and finally we'll be considering what the future holds

for Britain's opposition parties. On to our first item, the strange rebirth of Scottish

conservatism. Almost 20 years ago, the party was almost wiped out by Tony Blair. But now the polls are

suggesting that the Tories may take a third of the votes in Scotland. So, what's behind this?

And how seriously should we be taking the polls? I'm now joined by Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, and Fraser Nelson.

So Ruth, what's going on?

I think first of all, what I'd say is these are some great polls that we've had in, but polls aren't votes.

You know, we're going to work really, really hard until a general election to make sure that we make good on our promise.

But I think we have got some very strong indicators.

For example, in the Scottish elections last year, to the Holyrood Parliament, we more than doubled our share of the votes.

We doubled our number of seats up from 15 to 31. We leapfrogged labour,

put them in third place for the first time in 60 some years and became the official opposition

in Scotland. Now, I'm pretty ambitious for the party, so that's not really good enough for me. I've

got to now turn us into a government in waiting. But it does show that there is a genuine and sustained

recovery, and we've got the local government elections in Scotland that are happening right now. but it does show that there is a genuine and sustained recovery

and we've got the local government elections in Scotland that are happening right now

we'll get the results of those pretty soon and we'll be able to show it again

that we need to get Conservative representatives in every community in Scotland.

Fraser, what do you make of this rise of conservatism in Scotland?

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