Ruth Davidson: The 'tough old bird' of Tory Scotland

In May, Scotland goes to the polls to elect the Scottish Parliament. Could this be the moment for a Tory resurgence? John Sweeney met Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson for BBC Newsnight.

She is Tory, openly gay, Christian, likes a drink and, as a kick-boxer and ex-squaddie, can kill you. What's not to like? In the flesh, Ruth Davidson, 37, is a firkin of fun, speaks with a machine-gun delivery and can hold her own. And then some.

On the top of a knobbly hill across the way from Arthur's Seat, overlooking Holyrood in Edinburgh, I put to her my killer line: "If this was a Scottish gangster movie, you'd be wearing concrete boots."

"I'm not entirely sure what gangster movies you watch," she says. "But I think it's fair to say that the Scottish Conservatives have underperformed in recent years - particularly at that critical juncture in 1997. We got a lot of things wrong. We just had a wipeout."

As she spoke, Davidson gave me a sunny, easygoing smile with a hint of steel. Davidson needs to be uber-tough because bare knuckles and Scottish politics go together like horse and carriage.

Here, the simple fact of which nation we're in is disputed - and the polls suggest that Davidson, as a committed Unionist, could be on tricky ground. The Tories are hovering around 15%, behind Labour - and very far behind the Scottish National Party which is currently tipped, come May, to bag one in two votes.

Scottish political analyst David Torrance suggests that hard political fact is unlikely to change any time soon. He postulates that politics north of the border is "historically hegemonic". In the 19th Century, Scotland was broadly Liberal; in the 20th, Labour; in the 21st; Scottish Nationalist.

But the Tories used to do well in whole swathes of Scotland. They now repeatedly come third or fourth. One reason, according to some analysts, is the legacy of the hated poll tax and its architect, Mrs Thatcher - the great she-devil of Scottish nationalism. Did Davidson get bored with defending Mrs T?

"To be honest, that's not been the topic of conversation in Scotland for quite some time - we've had other things on our plate," she says.

"I was six months old when Margaret Thatcher came to power. I was in primary school when she left office - so it's not really something for my generation or the generations that come after me."

"I'm 37. You can vote now in Scotland at the age of 16 - so talk about Margaret Thatcher is the same as talking about Gladstone or Disraeli in terms of the distance that's there."

Seeking a weakness, I probed further: "Your mum and dad, they lived in a castle?" She snorted with derision. Her parents were working-class Tories and she was brought up in a housing estate.

You get the drift that she's as vulnerable as a claymore, and sharp with it too. I geo-name-dropped that I'd been to Chechnya: quick as a flash she was chatting about its neighbours, Dagestan and Ingushetia. Her interest in abroad was galvanised by her time as a signaller in the Territorial Army. She served for a bit in Kosovo and was moved by what she saw.

The one thing that got her goat, which she didn't block with her customary good humour, was homophobia.

"I do call out and will challenge or retweet or draw attention to it when people make homophobic remarks about me, because I've got a lot of young followers on Twitter, and I think they have to see that it is OK to say, 'That's not acceptable language. I do not have to accept this.'

"It's important in their lives, rather than a tough old bird like me."

In Davidson, the Tories have, cleverly or not, picked someone similar in appearance and brutal good humour to the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon. Davidson, too, has - like the late Denis Healey and Boris Johnson - that most precious quality thing in politics: authenticity.

But the polls aren't shifting in her favour and you wonder just how grim things would be for the Scottish Tories if she wasn't at the helm.

John Sweeney was reporting for BBC Newsnight - watch his piece here. He also plans to profile Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.