Race to the bottom in the Tory party - Alex Cole-Hamilton

Liz Truss during the Conservative Party Conference at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham. Picture: Jacob King/PA Wire

As I pulled up the live feed from Downing Street, my kids insisted that we also pull up the YouTube channel that was streaming the infamous lettuce. That was the one set up by the Daily Star who were convinced the perishable vegetable would outlast the hapless Prime Minister. My children wanted to watch the lettuce win in real time.

So ended the briefest and arguably most disastrous premiership in the history of these islands. But fast forward two years and you wouldn’t know it to look at the reception offered to Truss at this week’s Conservative Party conference. She was given a hero’s welcome.

Since her constituents relieved Liz Truss of her parliamentary duties, the former PM has been working hard to burrow into the wrong side of history. Shilling for Trump at the Republican convention and trying to convince the world that it was in fact the economists and the markets that were wrong about her mini-budget. Yet, inexplicably this is a person who carries massive heft in a Conservative Party which still greets her with thunderous applause.

Just look at the race to the bottom in the Conservative Party now. Leadership candidates trying to outdo each other in their loathing of the legal guarantor for human rights in this country, and one candidate questioning the value of maternity pay.

But this lurch to the right isn’t limited to the UK party. Russell Findlay, elected as Leader of the Scottish Conservatives last Friday, was an ardent supporter of Truss’s leadership bid and economic plan. He seems happy to run towards division rather than build the bridges we need to heal our fractured society.

More and more I meet fair-minded people who feel that the Scottish Conservatives have moved so far away from the party once led by Ruth Davidson. They are scunnered by the chaos, rule-breaking and partygate. The Conservatives were totally unfit to govern and are equally unfit for opposition.

The first headache of Findlay’s leadership came on the day he got the job, with a stunning by-election defeat in rural Perthshire, where the Scottish Liberal Democrats came from fourth place to take the council seat from the Conservatives in their traditional heartland. People are instead choosing to back our local champions who will put their priorities first, who believe in caring and sensible government, in working together with our neighbours and focusing on what really matters like helping everyone stuck on NHS waiting lists, lifting up Scottish education, getting a fair deal for our carers and getting our economy growing.

It’s why we won more seats than the Scottish Conservatives at the last election and showed we can beat the SNP in huge swathes of Scotland. It’s a sign of things to come.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and MSP for Edinburgh Western