Despite running the best organised, best financed, best targeted and best resourced campaign for a generation, Scottish Tories only managed a paltry 0.9% increase in their share of the vote.

They managed to return one MP out of 55 a situation that raises questions again of the Tories mandate to govern north of the border, a situation that will no doubt be exploited by those keen for the dissolution of the Union and perhaps inadvertently those who maybe don’t.

It is clear that the Conservative Party twenty years down the line is still suffering from a Thatcher induced hangover of the 1980s, when savage cutbacks in public spending laid waste to large parts of Scotland’s industrial landscape.

This scalpel treatment for the country’s economic woes left a lasting impression among the hundreds of thousands affected.

More importantly for today’s Conservatives though this resistance to anything remotely connected to Tory blue seems to have been passed down a generation.

Today’s voters are making up their mind about the Tories based on their deeds 20 years ago, not on their current policies. And that’s a big problem that a little bit of PR spin isn’t going to solve. On the back of this latest failure many grass roots activists are now calling on a root to branch review of the party’s organisation north of the border.

Annabel Goldie may not have been the only one to be disappointed by Scottish voters attitudes. The SNP was laughably short of its target of 20 seats but their vote did increase enough to push them back into second place. The Tories are firmly languishing in fourth polling less than 20% of the vote for the fourth election in a row and returning a solitary MP in David Mundell.

Many activists are openly looking at more fundamental changes to get away from the Thatcher spectre and what she did to define the set of political metaphors and memories in the Scottish electorate.

These changes are essential if voters mindsets are to be moved away from memories of the poll tax and widespread state sponsored industrial vandalism, just as previous generations had to stop going on about Jarrow and appeasement.
A new name would help but it is essentially a communications problem.

Their success in the Scottish Parliament is a case in point, with their achievements in helping get more police on the beat and keeping business rates down wholly hijacked by the SNP.

We are moving into difficult economic times and the Tories have tried to grab the baton as the only UK party up to the job. But the messages that appeal to middle England are just not washing north of Berwick.

For one nation Tories whose raison d’être is the United Kingdom this could be a massive issue. For ironically it may not be the SNP who ultimately deliver independence, it may be an issue forced by an English electorate fed up of having MPs they didn’t vote for meddling in their affairs.

The SNP simply may need to sit back and watch a three hundred year old institution wither.