Some days you wake up wondering if you’ve taken a step back in time. This week Peter Duncan, the former Galloway MP, called for the Scottish Conservatives to divorce themselves from the UK party, reform as another, different, centre-Right grouping and fight elections separately from the Conservatives. His plan was for this entity to be seen by voters as wholly new and separate from the rump UK Conservative party while pledging to support that rump in future governments (similar to the German arrangement where the CDU contests elections across the country but leaves the CSU to compete solely in Bavaria).

Even Mr Duncan had the good grace to acknowledge that it was an idea he had been touting for more than two decades. But he claimed that — in 2022 — the time for a new party had come owing to the chaotic nature of the No 10 operation and poor polls, which suggest heavy losses in May’s Scottish council elections unless we annul our relationship with the English and Welsh Conservatives immediately. Please.

Leaving aside the practicalities — and it takes a great deal longer than four months to establish and register a political party, recruit candidates for every council ward in the country, create a unified prospectus and launch it on the public consciousness — it is a bad idea and one that is, in itself, a short route to electoral suicide.

First, to have such a velvet divorce, you need willingness on both sides. And while Jeremiahs like Mr Duncan may look at the current situation and despair, the workhorses of the Scottish Conservative party are bullish about the campaign ahead. Having fought the Scottish Parliamentary election just eight months ago, the activist base is well drilled and fired up. And rightly so: they returned the joint highest number of MSPs to Holyrood in the history of devolution, while delivering 100,000 more voters to the cause than at any previous Holyrood poll.

The membership, tasked with voting such a plan through, would themselves revolt at such a revolution. The last time there was a serious push to unwind the Scottish Conservative party it happened during the leadership election of 2011, where the then deputy leader, Murdo Fraser, stood on just such a platform. Backed by Mr Duncan, his theory was that after 20 years of electoral stagnation and decline, it was impossible to win again as Conservatives in Scotland.

My argument then, when I entered the race, was that the medicine could just as easily kill the patient. I still believe that divorcing the UK Party, rebranding, but keeping largely the same people and prospectus, while pledging to support Conservatives in forming the UK Government would be seen by voters as both hollow and cynical. A bunch of moaning minnies either afraid or ashamed to call themselves Conservatives in case it costs them seats, but propping up a UK Tory government anyway, just with reduced influence over it.

Better, surely, to make the case for Conservative values — freedom, choice, responsibility, aspiration, hard work, family, country — with renewed vigour and genuinely Scottish application; reject the “othering” we were subject to by opponents by demonstrating that these values were the same values of voters right across the country. Better to stick up for our continued membership of the UK and showing, through better candidate recruitment and support, that Conservatives were community champions, already giving service through charity, voluntary groups, churches, work networks and a hundred other different ways.

And we proved — comprehensively — that Conservatives could win again in Scotland. In 2016 we doubled our number of MSPs in Holyrood and in 2017 repeated the feat at council chambers across the country. Five weeks after that poll, at the snap General Election, the party returned the largest number of Conservative MPs north of the border since 1983.

It is true that there are many in the Scottish Party who look at the trifecta of recent terrible stories — the Owen Paterson censure, the resultant fallout on second jobs, the Downing Street parties — and despair of how rudderless and shambolic it all is. The poll lead that has opened up for both Labour in voting intentions and Keir Starmer on leadership approval have given others the jitters.

And, just as we see jitters in Scotland, so too in the ‘Red Wall’ seats: recent polling across such constituencies showed the Tories now 16 points behind Labour.

But mid-term poll-bounces for the opposition are the norm, not the exception. Yes, Labour have, in Keir Starmer, someone far more electable to the swing voters who decide results than Jeremy Corbyn. And yes, the self-inflicted wounds of the past few weeks are serious. But they are not, as yet, fatal.

It is well known that I have clashed with the Prime Minister over the years, backed almost every other candidate in the leadership race, and stepped down as Scottish leader just a few weeks after Mr Johnson took office (for a combination of policy and personal reasons). So it is perhaps not surprising that I would believe that a change of leader could restore some of the moral authority lost over such debacles as the Downing Street parties or addressing the CBI unprepared, and riffing on Peppa Pig instead of the challenges of rebuilding after Covid.

But even with the current incumbent remaining in office, I urge colleagues to hold their nerve. I was first elected to Holyrood when the party recorded 12.4 per cent of the vote in Scotland. I’d previously fought a Westminster by-election where our only aim was to save our deposit. I know what electoral adversity and insurmountable odds looks like, and this is nowhere near the disaster people like Peter Duncan are suggesting.

Using these mid-term jitters to disavow nearly 200 years of party history or — worse — splitting off one part of the party forever, is not a route to guaranteed success. Conservatives in Scotland and beyond must, yes, demand better — much better — of the Prime Minister and his top team. But must also remember that those Conservative values, clearly articulated, resonate with voters everywhere, including Scotland and the red wall. And that is something we can all unite behind.

Ruth Davidson is the former leader of the Scottish Conservative Party