Iain Macwhirter Iain Macwhirter

What could explain Douglas Ross’s Westminster U-turn?

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross (Getty)

Scottish Tory Leader Douglas Ross has a side hustle as an assistant referee for the Scottish Football Association. Now, Scotland’s opposition parties are showing him the red card for his last minute decision to stand as parliamentary candidate for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency.

It’s a ‘stitch up,’ says the SNP. Ross is being cast as ‘shameful’, ‘nasty’ and the leader of a ‘morally bankrupt’ party for apparently elbowing aside former Tory minister, David Duguid, who’d said he was expecting to stand in the seat. Duguid has been in hospital with a spinal illness. But last night the Scottish Conservative Party Management Board announced that his ‘recovery would be put at risk if he stood in this election’.

It’s a ‘stitch up,’ says the SNP

The former Scottish Office minister had been the MP for Banff and Buchan since 2017, but that seat has been collapsed into Aberdeenshire and Moray East as result of boundary changes.

Written by
Iain Macwhirter

Iain Macwhirter is a former BBC TV presenter and was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022. He is an author of Road to Referendum and Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum but Lost Scotland.

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