THE Tories believe they are on the up in Scotland. They point to opinion polls that show them leapfrogging Labour into second place in Holyrood after May’s election.

In Ruth Davidson, the party believe, they have finally found someone who can help them shake off the “toxic” label that has haunted them in Scotland these past three decades.

As Davidson pointed out ahead of last May’s General Election, many of those voting would not even have been born when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Indeed, the lowering of the voting age for this year’s election to the Scottish Parliament to 16 means that first-time voters were born in 2000, some 11 years after the party booted Thatcher out.

It seems as if that toxic label has now been handed from the Conservatives to Labour, and there is little Kezia Dugdale’s party can do to stop the haemorrhaging votes, a fact that even Dugdale herself acknowledged during her leadership campaign last year.

Ironically, one of the main reasons for that decline was Labour standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Tories during the referendum campaign.

The “toxic Tory” branding always hid that the party had a fairly solid support up here.

In fact, the 14.9 per cent vote share the party achieved last May was the worst result since the Scottish Tories formed in 1965.

The Tories never died. Even at their lowest ebb, they were still breathing.

That’s a lesson for Labour, a lesson they seem to be doing their damnedest to ignore.

If the Tories do become the official opposition in Holyrood next year, it will be more to do with Labour’s collapse rather than an upsurge in support for Davidson’s party.

Indeed the two polls that showed the Tories in front of Labour seem to be blips; the last two polls have shown them five to eight points behind Labour. They’ve also shown a swing to Ukip.

Could it be that David Cameron’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU has cost them second place?

David Cameron: Tories are the true opposition of the SNP