Scottish Conservatives

The Scottish Conservatives have been the principal right-of-centre party at Holyrood since 2016, when Ruth Davidson led the party to 31 seats and established it as the main opposition to the SNP. Since Davidson's departure in 2019, successive leaders — Jackson Carlaw, Douglas Ross and now Russell Findlay (elected leader in November 2023) — have struggled to maintain that position. The Electoral Calculus MRP of 7 April 2026 projects the Scottish Conservatives on just 9 Holyrood seats — all from regional lists, zero constituency seats. All five current Conservative constituency seats (Aberdeenshire West, Dumfriesshire, Eastwood, Ettrick Roxburgh and Berwickshire, and Galloway and West Dumfries) are projected to fall to the SNP. It would be the first time since devolution began in 1999 that the Scottish Tories held no constituency representation.

Scottish Labour is projected at 17 seats, overtaking the Conservatives as official opposition — a further humiliation for a party that has held that status since 2016. The Institute for Fiscal Studies assessed the Conservative manifesto Get Scotland Working, launched by Russell Findlay, and described its £500 pensioner tax cut as unlikely to survive contact with reality. The party's collapse reflects a broader pattern: roughly a third of 2024 Scottish Conservative voters have moved to Reform UK. Under the Additional Member System, regional list seats are particularly sensitive to vote-share shifts among smaller parties, making the Conservative regional allocation vulnerable to a resurgent Reform.

For readers tracking the wider Conservative collapse across the UK, Holyrood 2026 may be the starkest data point: a party that held 31 seats as recently as 2016 reduced to single figures by the combined pressure of a surging SNP and a Reform UK funded at historically unprecedented levels. The Scottish result will likely influence how the British Conservative Party frames its national recovery strategy after May.