Ruth Davidson is on manoeuvres. What is she playing at?

So Ruth Davidson, honorary colonel in the signals reserve, is on manoeuvres again. It is past time, the leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party says, for the government to rethink its approach to immigration. Time, instead, for an adult debate on the subject at the end of which, she hopes, the government will rethink its obstinate insistence on treating immigration as nothing more than a numbers game. And since the government keeps missing its targets on immigration, perhaps it would be sensible to revise those targets? At the very least, she says, it is absurd to insist that foreign undergraduates should be counted as immigrants when the public itself doesn’t think they should. 

This is all very grown-up and therefore, in the current climate, intensely suspicious. What is she playing at? The simplest, if also the least fashionable, explanation is that Davidson actually says what she thinks and means what she says.