Scottish Tory conferences have not in recent years been marked by a sense of optimism. The party gathering north of the Border has long had a sense of the undead about it, a predominantly ageing group of loyalists harking back to the days when Conservatism was a force in the land and when they could rub shoulders, however briefly, with those whose names meant something in terms of the exercise of real power.

But the rise of New Labour and the party's instinct in the 1990s for political self-immolation put paid to all that. The Scottish Tories have been left thanking God for devolution ever since. That, and probably that alone, has saved them from complete decline in Scotland.

And yet, when the faithful meet in Ayr this weekend, it is a safe bet that unfamiliar talk of victory will be on everyone's lips. Of course, this will have nothing at all to do with the Scottish Tories but with the expected victory of David Cameron's New Conservatives far to the south in Crewe and Nantwich. Unless the voters of Crewe have been misleading all and sundry, the UK Conservative leader will come to Ayr basking in the afterglow of adding to Gordon Brown's growing discomfort amid talk that a Tory general election victory is, if not inevitable, certainly probable.

No one should begrudge it to the Scottish Tories if they join in - after all, they don't get the chance that often - but the more intelligent among them will ponder whether a triumph in Crewe only succeeds in putting more pressure on the party up here to start delivering for Cameron's compassionate Conservatives down south. The deeply unimpressive David Mundell is the only Scottish Tory MP in the Commons and even the most generous assessments would say that he is unlikely to be joined by more than four or five others when voters go to the polls in 2010. Still, as one senior Tory MSP pointed out, that is three or four more than most predictions only a year ago.

That should not be taken as meaning that the Conservatives have made major progress in Scotland in the past year. But it is striking that Cameron and Annabel Goldie, the Scots Tory leader, the have confronted, by dint of their personalities as much as anything, the sheer visceral dislike with which the bulk of Scottish voters have perceived the Tories.

Anything less than a few Scottish gains in 2010 will, however, confirm that the Conservative brand struggles to make an impact in four-party Scotland and that the familiar, and now faintly ludicrous, Scottish prejudice against voting Tory is still all too real.

Yet only the prejudiced would argue that the Scottish Tories have not had a good year since they stood still at last year's elections.

Minority SNP government has been good for them in that they have been seen for the first time in long enough as real players able to claim that they have exploited the arithmetic with some aplomb.

The question still to be answered is whether voters are even slightly aware that it was Miss Goldie and her colleagues who won concessions from the SNP on police numbers, business rate cuts and a new drugs strategy. The case that this will make Scottish voters feel more charitable towards the Tories is unproven and what passes for opinion polls in Scotland have, so far, provided no positive evidence.

Having said that, the common assumption is that the advent of a Tory Government at Westminster would be the catalyst for Scottish independence. It is based on the flimsy evidence that a Cameron-led Government would behave in the same way towards the Scots that a Thatcher or Major Government did.

Mr Cameron is likely to be much more subtle than that; Cameronian needs-based reforms of the Barnett Formula, which will play well in England, could, for example, go hand in hand with a reform of Holyrood's tax powers, thus, hopefully, winning for his party a new tolerance in Scotland. The trick for Mr Cameron will be to do nothing which plays to Scotland's sense of anti-Tory grievance. If he can pull that off, then the Tories' long, dark night in Scotland could at last be coming to an end.