General Election 2015: Scottish Tory candidate Alexander Stewart on tactical voting as SNP surges ahead

The former head of the Tory group in Perth and Kinross council is now aiming to win the marginal seat of Perth and North Perthshire

The message from the local politician sounds friendly and sincere. “I look forward to a working relationship with the SNP which will bring many benefits.” After David Cameron called the prospect of SNP influence at Westminster “frightening”, the warm words - from a Tory councillor speaking in Perthshire only two years ago – isn’t the current party line.

Alexander Stewart, the former head of the Tory group in Perth and Kinross, council, is now aiming to win the marginal seat of Perth and North Perthshire. The constituency is in the shadows of Schiehallion, the mountain whose lines of latitude and longitude place it at the geographical centre of the Scottish mainland.

Mr Stewart’s agreement with an SNP minority group looks like pragmatic politics.

But on the main street in Perth, as they have for most weekends of the 2015 campaign, a small tactical voting campaign, Forward Together, was urging Labour and Liberal Democrat voters to back Mr Stewart and defeat the SNP.

The head of Forward Together is Victor Clements, a former Liberal Democrat who believes the SNP’s influence at Westminster, if they were to send the numbers the polls predict, would be “utterly destructive.”

Pete Wishart has held the seat for the SNP since 2001, extending his party’s hold on the territory that goes back to a by-election win in 1995. On Thursday night the ballot boxes in Perth will look familiar – a straight fight between the Tories and the SNP.

Wishart isn’t impressed with Forward Together. “Their influence will be next to nothing. They are uber-unionists who say there’s a large group here wanting to vote tactically. In reality that doesn’t exist. The resonance is negligible. The Tory vote will be around 25 percent. Static over the years.”

---

Are you undecided about who to vote for on 7 May? Are you confused about what the parties stand for and what they are offering? Take this interactive quiz to help you decide who to vote for...

Click here to launch

---

Among the leaflets handed out in Perth, some are from another tactical voting (TV) group that emerged just as the election campaign kicked off.

Alistair Cameron, the director of Scotland in Union (SiU) says he resigned from the LibDems to ensure his new organisation was officially non-aligned. Unlike Wishart he believes the post-referendum circumstances of Scotland’s politics mean “people are prepared to put aside their usual allegiances.”

He told the Independent on Sunday: “It’s a question of trust. People don’t trust the SNP on North Sea oil calculations, on more devolved powers. They don’t believe another referendum isn’t coming.”

SiU have been campaigning in Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, East Lothian, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Although Cameron is reluctant to admit it, the main TV groups in Scotland, which also includes United Against Separation, and Scotland’s Big Voice, tend to keep off each others local turf.

Cameron accepts that when the counts are completed early on Friday morning “we won’t know what difference TV has made”. But he expects some high-profile upsets.

Alex Salmond is predicted to return to Westminster by taking the Aberdeenshire seat of Gordon from the Liberal Democrats. SiU think that the TV campaign backing the Liberal Democrat candidate, Christine Jardine, who has the best chance of disappointing the former first minister, is “certainly having an effect”.

In Edinburgh North and Leith, where Labour’s Mark Lazarowicz is trying to hold out against the SNP, Conservatives, according to Cameron, hold the key to keeping a pro-union MP at Westminster.

In Jim Murphy’s East Renfrewshire constituency his own aides are putting the recent five percent jump in the polls down to Tories deciding that as TV is the only way of keeping out the SNP, they’ll vote for the Scottish Labour leader.

Believable? Cameron, a management consultant in Edinburgh, admits any Conservative deciding to switch is going against the grain of London HQ which has talked up the prospect of a SNP-Labour deal, which plays better in England than it does in Scotland.

A YouGov poll commissioned by SiU estimates that one in seven Scots could turn to TV this week.

Professor John Curtice at Strathclyde University however thinks the impact of TV will be minimal, affecting at most only seven of the block of seats the SNP are forecast to win on a wipe-out night that could change Scottish politics.

Cameron disagrees and thinks, given the closeness of the wider UK contest, TV could play a significant role. He says “Look, it’ll be hard to judge. In Scotland’s case, TV may be like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a small bucket. But what’s the alternative?”