RUTH Davidson’s new Scottish Tory MPs have been dealt a fresh snub by the UK Government after failing to secure a single parliamentary private secretary post in Theresa May’s reshuffle.
There had been some expectation at least one of the 12 would have secured a new role when the Prime Minister made changes to her team of ministers and aides, possibly by moving David Mundell’s PPS Alberto Costa.
But when the full list was published earlier this month, it revealed the South Leicestershire MP, who grew up in Scotland, would be continuing in his role assisting the Scottish Secretary in Edinburgh and that none of the 12 new Scottish MPs had been promoted.
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It is the second time since June’s General Election that the Scottish Tories have missed out, after the Prime Minister controversially handed a peerage to Scotland’s only Tory MEP Ian Duncan and appointed him as a junior minister in the Scotland Office instead of one of the 2017 Commons intake.
Pete Wishart, the SNP’s shadow leader of the House of Commons, and chairman of the Scottish Affairs Committee, said: “Out of all the recent appointments made in the ministerial reshuffle the new Scottish Conservative MPs have failed to secure a single place, demonstrating their true value and worth.
“There are so many new posts that it is almost harder to come out of this reshuffle without a position than to have secured one.
“Unbelievably they have even been passed over for any of the posts available as parliamentary private secretaries.
“Such is the assessment of their abilities that they can’t even be trusted to carry the bags of ministers. The final indignity, though, must be the Scotland Office deciding to pass on them, employing a Member of Parliament from an English Constit-uency for the one PPS job in that department.
“The Scottish Conservative MPs vowed to stand out as a group and in this they have surely succeeded. No other group has been so totally ignored when it has come to the allocation of jobs.
“The Scottish Conservatives, for all their acquiescence and commitment to the lobby fodder cause, now find themselves totally marooned on the back benches’.”
John Lamont, the former Scottish Conservative chief whip at Holyrood, had been seen as a frontrunner to become junior minister in the Scotland Office back in June.
But Lamont, who had been an MSP for 10 years before becoming an MP, missed out on that role and was even overlooked for a “bag carrier” PPS post in yesterday’s announcement.
One of the new PPS appointments announced yesterday was David Warburton, Tory MP for Somerton and Frome, who sparked fury last year when he called SNP MPs “rejected extras from a low-budget Lord of the Rings spin-off”.
A Scotland Office source said: “Alberto Costa – who Pete Wishart forgets is a Scot – is an outstanding PPS to the Secretary of State for Scotland.
“Pete’s latest nonsense seems to have been sparked by the uncomfortable realisation that Scotland’s newly elected Conservative MPs have already proved far more effective than he and his Nationalist colleagues have ever been.”
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