22MAY

Findlay co-opts his Scottish Tory rivals

3 min read

10:09UTC

Russell Findlay survived post-election leadership pressure by giving frontbench posts to Murdo Fraser and Meghan Gallacher; the Scottish Conservatives finished on 12 Holyrood seats, their smallest result since 1999, ceding official opposition to Scottish Labour on 17.

← Back to Three constitutional contests open Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Findlay's co-option absorbs the challenge without a vote; the summer conference is the next institutional test.

Russell Findlay survived the immediate post-election leadership pressure on the Scottish Conservatives by giving frontbench posts to both his potential rivals. Murdo Fraser took Business, Economy, Tourism and Culture; Meghan Gallacher took Housing; Sandesh Gulhane kept the Health spokesperson role he already held . All Scottish Conservative Westminster MPs publicly backed him within hours of the appointments.

The Scottish Conservatives finished on 12 Holyrood seats, 9.3% of the chamber and the smallest result since devolution in 1999 . Scottish Labour on 17 takes the official opposition role and the financial allowances that follow. Co-option is the classical procedural answer to a leadership challenge without a public mandate: bring the potential rival inside the tent before they can build the case for a vote. Gulhane declined to rule out Findlay being ousted on 8 May but did not trigger a contest. Bringing Fraser and Gallacher onto the frontbench means a contested vote would have to come from a fourth source the public has not yet heard from.

The arrangement holds until the summer Scottish Conservative conference, the institutional venue where a contest would need to be either tabled or formally deferred. Reform UK on 17 seats ties Scottish Labour on raw numbers and represents 13% of the chamber but sits outside the official opposition convention. Holyrood's post-7-May opposition runs through Anas Sarwar, not through Findlay. The Scottish Conservatives' route back to the official opposition would require either a Reform implosion at Holyrood or a Labour collapse, neither of which the seat arithmetic currently supports.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Scotland's Conservative Party had its worst result at Holyrood since devolution began in 1999, winning only 12 seats. Their leader, Russell Findlay, came under immediate pressure to resign. He survived by giving the two politicians most likely to challenge him, Murdo Fraser and Meghan Gallacher, jobs in his opposition team. This is a classic political manoeuvre: bring potential rivals inside the tent so they do not have an external platform to build a case against you. The Scottish Conservatives are now the fourth-largest party in Holyrood, behind the SNP, Scottish Labour, and Reform UK Scotland. Scottish Labour, with 17 seats, is now the official opposition, which means it gets more resources and leads parliamentary debates. The next test for Findlay is the Scottish Conservative summer conference, where a formal leadership challenge could be raised.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The Scottish Conservative collapse from the 2017 peak of 31 seats to 12 in 2026 traces three interlocking structural causes. First, Ruth Davidson's departure in 2019 removed the party's distinctive Scottish brand and left it dependent on UK Conservative electoral performance for Scottish momentum, which became a liability through the Partygate and Truss cycles.

Second, Reform UK Scotland's arrival at 17 Holyrood seats in 2026 specifically ate into the unionist and social-conservative vote that formed the Scottish Tory core since devolution. Third, Scottish Labour's recovery to 17 seats under Anas Sarwar took the centre-right unionist tactical vote that had previously parked with Davidson's Tories to keep the SNP out of a majority.

Findlay inherited all three structural disadvantages simultaneously. His immediate problem is not the leadership challenge, which co-option has absorbed; it is the 9.3% chamber position that has reduced the Scottish Conservatives to a fourth or fifth force rather than the credible official opposition they were under Davidson.

What could happen next?

Risk
Fraser's appointment to a lesser portfolio than he previously shadowed gives him limited institutional reason to maintain loyalty to Findlay if poll ratings do not improve before the summer conference.
Short term · Assessed
Consequence
Losing official opposition status means Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar chairs the relevant Holyrood committees and receives additional parliamentary funding, shifting the Scottish parliamentary agenda away from Scottish Conservative priorities for this parliament.
Immediate · Reported
Precedent
A Scottish Conservative party at 9.3% of the chamber for a full parliamentary cycle would be the weakest devolved Conservative performance in any of the four UK nations, with implications for its funding formula allocation from party headquarters.
Long term · Assessed

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Ruth Davidson's consolidation after the 2017 Holyrood election absorbed potential challengers including Murdo Fraser by ensuring all significant figures held shadow portfolios before any post-election destabilisation period could develop.

The 2017 model succeeded because Davidson's 31-seat recovery gave the party a shared mission and sufficient committee positions and financial allowances to sustain a large frontbench. At 12 seats, Findlay has fewer patronage resources, fewer committee positions, and no Short money equivalent as a party that has lost official opposition status.

Counter-parallel: In 2003, David McLetchie lost the Scottish Conservative leadership in a contested internal vote after the party fell to 18 Holyrood seats. McLetchie's fall came two years into the Parliament rather than in the immediate post-election period; the longer-term pressure on Findlay comes if the summer conference becomes the institutional moment Fraser or Gallacher calculate their prospects are better in a contest than on a diminished frontbench.

Consensus view: The Constitution Unit at UCL and David Torrance's scholarship on Scottish Conservative parliamentary history both identify Findlay's co-option as a compressed version of Ruth Davidson's 2017 post-election management, where Davidson similarly absorbed intra-party rivals by retaining them on the frontbench rather than allowing external platforms to develop.

Torrance notes that Davidson's 2017 success depended on the Scottish Tories posting their best result in the UK, giving co-opted rivals a shared mission. Findlay's 2026 equivalent requires demonstrating recovery from the worst devolved result in Scottish Conservative history without that corresponding electoral momentum.

Counter-view: Murdo Fraser's appointment to Business, Economy and Tourism represents a demotion from his pre-election shadow finance brief, which carried more media visibility. A frontbench post in a 12-MSP group with no realistic prospect of government has less patronage value than the same post in the 31-MSP group Fraser and Davidson ran together in 2017.

Fraser has previously advocated for a de-merger of the Scottish Conservatives from the UK Conservative Party, a structural position that Findlay has not adopted and that gives Fraser a differentiated political identity even from within the frontbench.

Key tension: Whether Findlay can sustain the co-option arrangement through the Scottish Conservative summer conference, the institutional venue where a formal leadership vote could be tabled, or whether Fraser and Gallacher's calculation about the value of their frontbench posts shifts if the 12-seat figure does not improve.

Sources:STV News

Mentions:Sandesh Gulhane →Scottish Conservatives →Scottish Labour →Anas Sarwar →Reform UK →Holyrood →Westminster →Scottish National Party (SNP) →Russell Findlay →Conservative Party →

First Reported In

Update #9 · Three constitutional contests open

STV News· 22 May 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Reform enters Holyrood on 17 MSPs

Reform UK entering Holyrood on 17 seats and tying Scottish Labour was the pressure context for Findlay's co-option manoeuvre.

Occurred 6 May 2026

Read story →

Findlay refuses to quit Tory leadership

Findlay's initial refusal to resign on 14 May was the direct predecessor to the frontbench co-option described here.

Occurred 13 May 2026

Read story →

This Event

Findlay co-opts his Scottish Tory rivals

A frontbench co-option absorbs would-be challengers without a confidence vote, the procedural manoeuvre that buys leadership time without resolving the seat collapse.

Different Perspectives

UK Government (Labour)

Westminster framed the youth justice transfer as a culmination of prior work rather than a precedent, refused a Section 30 order before the request arrived, and omitted both the Representation of the People Bill and any Wales Bill from the 13 May King's Speech. Starmer is described as open to a devolved-leaders summit in June.

Reform UK

Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk filed pre-action protocol letters framing their LGR challenge as mandate-consistent, while 22 Reform councillors departed in 14 days at an annualised rate nearly three times the 10 percent projection. Richard Tice defended the Harborne 5 million pound gift as unconditional, with no acknowledgement of Farage's two contradictory accounts on record.

SNP (Scottish Government)

Swinney submitted a Section 30 request on 14 May citing the 73-seat SNP-Greens pro-independence bloc and the 2014 Edinburgh Agreement precedent, despite the SNP finishing seven below his self-set 65-seat trigger. Downing Street's contradictory readout of their call suggests Westminster is treating the request as a holding item rather than a live constitutional negotiation.

Welsh Government (Plaid Cymru)

ap Iorwerth framed the youth justice transfer as a starting point for his six-power Wales Bill agenda, pressing demands at a phone call with Keir Starmer on 18 May and winning the first statutory function transfer to Cardiff since 1999. The Greens' unwritten confidence-and-supply arrangement gives him 45 of 96 seats, four short of a majority.

Russell Findlay (Scottish Conservatives)

Findlay refused to resign as Scottish Conservative leader after the party fell to 12 Holyrood seats and lost all five constituency MSPs. He declined Swinney's post-election talks invitation, the only major-party leader to do so.

John Swinney (SNP)

Swinney committed on 14 May to a Holyrood Section 30 vote within a week despite winning seven seats fewer than his own trigger threshold, relying on a SNP-Green majority of 73. He tabled a meeting with Starmer; Downing Street disputed that any referendum discussion was agreed.