Vote for Reform will hand key Scottish seat to SNP, warns Douglas Ross

Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, has warned voters in the battleground seat he is fighting that backing Reform UK will lead to an SNP victory there.

John Swinney, the First Minister, is to visit the key Aberdeenshire North and Moray East seat on Monday, and Mr Ross said this showed he knew the constituency would be a close battle between the Conservatives and SNP.

The Scottish Tory leader told The Telegraph that voters backing Nigel Farage’s Reform UK would lead to the SNP “winning this seat by the back door” in the knife-edge fight.

Mr Ross faced an outcry when he replaced David Duguid as the Tory candidate for the seat. Mr Duguid, a former Scotland Office minister, was deselected over concerns about his health, but has insisted he would have won the seat from his hospital bed.

The row prompted the SNP to upgrade Aberdeenshire North and Moray East to a “tier one” target, pouring extra resources into it in an effort to defeat Mr Ross.

In a further blow to the Scottish Tory leader, a poll in the Sunday Times has put Scottish support for Reform at eight per cent.

Internal report warns of loss of three Tory seats

Although it is not enough to win Mr Farage’s party a seat north of the border, Sir John Curtice, Britain’s leading polling expert warned: “Nevertheless, it is a big threat to Conservative hopes of retaining their six seats in Scotland.”

The Tories are fighting the SNP in all six seats they won in the 2019 election, three in the North East and three in the Scottish Borders.

They are also trying to take six SNP-held seats, including Gordon and Buchan in Aberdeenshire, Perth and Kinross-shire and Angus and Perthshire Glens.

But an internal party report has warned the Scottish Tories could end up with only three seats if Reform hives off some of their support, with the SNP taking the others.

On Monday, Mr Swinney will visit Peterhead fish market in the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency to campaign alongside Seamus Logan, the SNP candidate.

The first minister has claimed he will have a mandate to open negotiations with the next UK government for an independence referendum if the SNP wins 29 seats, a majority of the 57 being contested in Scotland on Thursday.

It has also emerged that at least three Reform candidates, including the one in Gordon and Buchan, have previously supported independence.

‘Every vote here will matter’

Mr Ross, who is standing down as Scottish Tory leader after the election and has said he will give up his Holyrood seat if elected to Westminster, said Aberdeenshire North and Moray East was “a straight fight between the Scottish Conservatives and the SNP”.

He said: “Every vote here will matter and John Swinney knows this as well as I do, which is why he is here just a few days before the election.

“A vote for Reform or any other party – or not voting at all – on Thursday risks the SNP winning this seat by the back door.”

Urging voters to support him, he said the Tories could “beat the SNP, end their independence obsession for good and ensure the focus moves on to the real priorities of people and communities across Aberdeenshire North and Moray East.”

A series of polls has indicated that the SNP will lose well over half the 48 seats it won in the 2019 election, with Labour re-emerging as Scotland’s largest Westminster party.

Mr Swinney told BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show that he would still have a mandate for independence from the 2021 Holyrood election, despite the SNP’s failure to win a majority.

But he struggled to explain why this would trump the mandate Labour would have to deny him a referendum if Sir Keir Starmer’s party wins a majority of Scottish seats in this week’s general election.

Swinney knows he won’t have mandate, says Salmond

Alex Salmond, the former first minister and Alba Party leader, tweeted that he had watched the interview and he knew Mr Swinney “very well.”

“My conclusion is that he’s already mentally accepted that he won’t have a mandate for anything after Thursday, which is why he tracks back to the 2021 Scottish election mandate,” Mr Salmond said.

“That’s not the SNP’s strongest suit since they did nothing with it. For John, this current election is now about political positioning following defeat.”