Douglas Ross and the Global Extinction of the Sensible Right: A Scottish Tragedy in Gore-Tex

By the time the rest of the planet bothered to notice, Douglas Ross had already resigned twice—once from Boris Johnson’s government and then, in a flourish of impeccable Scottish timing, from his own leadership of the Scottish Conservatives. To most foreign desks the news landed like a weather report from Stornoway: damp, predictable, and of existential importance only to the eight people standing in the drizzle. Yet viewed from farther afield, Ross’s slow-motion eclipse is a tidy parable for the twilight of Western centre-right insurgency everywhere from Ottawa to Canberra.

Start with the optics. In an age when strongmen pose shirtless on horseback, Douglas Ross campaigns in sensible Gore-Tex, the sartorial equivalent of a risk-assessment form. For international audiences raised on the high-octane populism of Bolsonaro or Duterte, watching Ross politely offer to “hold the SNP to account” feels like sipping warm Irn-Bru while Rome burns. His entire brand—telegenic but not too telegenic, unionist but not Orange-Order-parade unionist—was calibrated for a pre-Brexit, pre-Truss, perhaps even pre-2014 universe. That universe, to put it mildly, has left the chat.

Zoom out and you see the same species dying on every continent: the managerial moderate who believes spreadsheets can still shout down demagogues. Germany’s Friedrich Merz can’t seem scary enough for the AfD, Canada’s Pierre Poilievre keeps cosplaying a trucker, and across the Tasman the New Zealand National Party is polling slightly behind a minor party whose entire platform is “make housing affordable and also ban cats.” Ross fits neatly into this endangered cohort: the technocrat who discovered, too late, that technocracy is now a punchline.

Why should the world care? Because Scotland is quietly the geopolitical canary in the devolutionary coal mine. Should the SNP finally secure IndyRef2 and win it, the UK’s nuclear deterrent ends up homeless, NATO has to reconfigure its North Atlantic chessboard, and Spain gets fresh nightmares about Catalonia. Ross’s primary political task was to prevent that unraveling armed with nothing more potent than a frown and a press release. International observers—especially in Brussels, Beijing, and the State Department—have therefore been watching the Scottish Tories less as a party than as a prophylactic. The fact that it now needs a new prophylactic is, diplomatically speaking, alarming.

Then there is the meta-comedy of succession. Ross will apparently stay on as leader until after the general election, a bit like the captain of the Titanic volunteering to remain at the helm until the iceberg formally files its complaint. Potential replacements include an ex-MSP who once compared Nicola Sturgeon to Robert Mugabe and a former leader who already resigned in 2020 because he took undisclosed lobbying money—proving that the Scottish Conservative talent pool is both shallow and slightly radioactive. International bookmakers, ever the romantics, list the party’s odds of gaining seats at roughly the same probability of Scotland winning the next Cricket World Cup.

In the end, Douglas Ross’s fate is less personal tragedy than structural gag. The global right has decided that moderation is for losers and Union Jacks are best waved by people who spell it “Union Jakcs.” Meanwhile, the global left is busy arguing about whether kilts are colonial. Trapped in the middle, Ross exits stage centre, still clutching his yellow referee cards from his weekend side-gig as a football linesman—the only arena, it seems, where he still gets to blow the whistle.

Conclusion? Somewhere in a think-tank in Doha, a junior analyst just updated a spreadsheet titled “Minor Political Extinctions, 2024 Edition.” Douglas Ross now sits between the Icelandic Pirate Party and the Dutch agrarian protest movement. The analyst sighs, adds a footnote—“Couldn’t outrun nationalism in hiking boots”—and moves on to weightier disasters. After all, the world has bigger fish to deep-fry.