For most political parties, a good (in the circumstances) conference and an even-more-splendid-than-expected speech by their leader would be reasons to rejoice. But the post-Birmingham euphoria that has engulfed the Tories nationally does not stretch as far as Scotland.

It’s true that Annabel Goldie and her merry men have had a spring in their step since David Cameron launched his most convincing bid yet for No 10. They probably thought they had a jolly good conference, too.

But nobody else regards the Scottish rump with anything other than concern, and this view has become increasingly pronounced the more Cameron has bounced. Instead of being part of his success, the Scottish Tories are seen as the antithesis, not just a threat to his electoral hopes but a potential cloud over any future Tory government.

This makes them sound worse than they are. Goldie has not been an embarrassment to her party in the way that some Scottish leaders have been to theirs. And she has staved off a collapse in the Tory vote here, though she hasn’t exactly done much to boost it. In the last election, the Tories won 17 seats to the Lib Dems’ 16, and in the latest opinion poll they had 17% of the vote, compared with 13% for the Lib Dems.

Also, she has not been humiliated personally by the rapier cunning of Alex Salmond, standing her ground in Holyrood and scoring points — for her jokes if nothing else.

However, being a half decent leader is not nearly enough in the Tory party, as the English contingent eventually realised. The rout of 1997, which saw 171 Conservatives lose their Westminster seats, has taken more than 10 years to repair.

From Central Office in London, the Tories began to regroup once the shock had worn off. They experimented with three different leaders before Cameron came to their rescue. And they flirted with different strategies, from Hague’s “listening to Britain”, to Iain Duncan Smith’s “fair deal”, via Michael Howard (“are you thinking what we’re thinking?”), until they arrived at where they are today with Cameron’s version of caring Conservatism.

Perhaps most significantly, they searched the country for a new generation of Tory MPs and only now do they have an A-list of candidates that looks and sounds promising enough to challenge 11 years of New Labour rule.

The reinvented Tories, with their carefully cultivated softer side and no-nonsense inner core, are now talked about confidently as the next government — except in Scotland. All the hard work that has transformed the party and its prospects in England has simply not happened here, and for that devolution is largely to blame.

Eighteen months after the 1997 general election, Scottish Tories found they had a voice in the devolved parliament. Thanks to proportional representation, they won a respectable 18 seats in the first Scottish elections and, despite having no Westminster presence, didn’t look quite so defeated all of a sudden. Since then they have focused on devolution, which they had once opposed, instead of rebuilding their base in the country. It has been a huge and mostly happy distraction from confronting the dire state of their support in Scotland and by far the easier option.

And with the triumph of the nationalists last year, they have become even more obsessed by events in Edinburgh, trying to engage a very slippery enemy with little help from London. But a sharp change of focus is required to give Cameron the kind of victory in the next election that our first minister Alex Salmond can’t take advantage of and thus preserve the Union. The SNP leader is already salivating at the likely scenario of the Conservatives romping home on the back of English votes but with a dismal showing in Scotland, assuming correctly that the case for independence can only be strengthened if Britain’s governing party has no mandate north of the border.

How can the Tories recover some relevance in Scotland in time for a general election, which has to be held by spring 2010? It can’t just be left to Goldie to galvanise her troops. Most of Cameron’s best ideas — on fighting crime, on education and health, and reducing bureaucracy — are on domestic issues, which are reserved in Scotland. Cameron’s own team must explain to Scots why he is their man, as much as England’s.

But what the Holyrood Tories can do is disseminate the Cameron message more effectively. His appeal lies in a more general connection with voters than in any specific policies. He has made his party fashionable with the electorate for the first time in more than a decade, and he has articulated the concerns of ordinary voters in language they understand.

Goldie is on the right track with her preoccupation with crime, soft sentencing and prison capacity. And in attacking SNP plans to raise the age-limit for buying alcohol, her MSPs championed a popular cause, winning friends even among the usually hostile student body.

Since Tory votes in Scotland will be lost to the nationalists, she should concentrate on further exposing Salmond’s agenda for the propaganda exercise it is. Why, for example, was there not a Tory rapid response unit to pick apart the flawed free school meals initiative when it was announced last week?

And why can the Scottish Tories not present a radical alternative to failing schools as Cameron has, or weigh into the “laws”, “rules” and “arrogance” of the state and a health service bogged down by targets and red tape? This is what people want to hear.

Disaffected Conservative voters handed Labour victory in three general elections by staying away from the ballot box in their thousands. The signs are that they are returning in their thousands, in England. Here the Tories will be lucky if they add three Westminster seats to their current grand total of one. This, surely, is not an accurate reflection of Tory sentiment in Scotland. Mobilising the vote must be Goldie’s primary mission now — though on the evidence so far, one is tempted towards pessimism.

“I get the modern world,” said Cameron in Birmingham. Do his Scottish colleagues?

jenny.hjul@sunday-times.co.uk

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