Ruth Davidson's mutating policy positions are not to be admired

Her party argued the First Minister “should commit to re-entering Scotland into all the main international education comparison tests and should design the new standardised tests at P1, P4 and P7 according to these international standards.”

But with a minority government, cantankerous teaching unions and a disquieted opposition looking for any opportunity to assert itself, it appears Davidson’s party is now inclined to update its curriculum.

Never one to let piffling things like ideology, past commitments, or prior contrary statements dissuade her from capitalising on political opportunities – the Tory leader has apparently decided she’s dead against the standardised testing of primary ones to benchmark their literacy and numeracy during their first years in education. Holyrood seems likely to shoot down the initiative on a Conservative motion next week.

Colour me unstunned. This is just another shameless flip, to add to her party’s many other flops. Under Davidson’s leadership – unencumbered by anything resembling consistency, conscience or intellectual self-respect – the Scottish Tories continue to behave with all the ideological suppleness of a well-oiled conger eel.

Ginger up whatever euphemism you like for the directionlessness, cynicism and pandering of their policy platform. For some, it might look like “canny opportunism”. Perhaps “deft political operating”. Perhaps this kind of chicanery is what people mean, when they talk about “political centrism”.

But to me? It’s just a study in political soullessness. The work of an intellectual nobody. Give me an unrepentant Thatcherite over this mob any day. A mad, gunboat Brexiteer even. A black-hearted social conservative. A privatiser. A private schooler. A tax-cutter or a bring-back-the-bircher. At least you’d know where you stand with this array of bastards, humbugs and pinstripes. For all of the warm notices she receives, Davidson’s constantly mutating politics should be a source of suspicion, not admiration, wherever on the ideological spectrum you sit.

Only a fool never changes their mind. But a political leader whose mind changes with every turn of the media cycle? I don’t know about you, but I prefer my politics with just a little more ideological ballast.

The pattern is now unmistakable. Enjoying the mouthfeel of accusing the SNP of having a “sinister centralising agenda”, the Conservatives conveniently forgot their 2011 manifesto backed the idea of a single police force. As spring gave way to summer, Davidson managed to argue for – and vote against – the idea that tax cuts to the richest 10% of Scots would help support investment in health services.

The Tories’ dividedness on education doesn’t end at the primary school gates. The party has a history of singing in disharmony about higher education too.

Liz Smith – an unreformed George Watson’s schoolmarm and her party’s education spokesperson – is fond of firing out press releases demanding that our universities should admit more young people from Scotland’s disadvantaged communities and, days later, denouncing these institutions’ efforts to do so as outrageously restricting the rights of private school kids from Scotland’s wealthiest districts to enter the ancient institutions some still seem to regard as their birthright.

The university folks call it “contextual admissions”. In your Higher chemistry or history, it may seem like an A is an A. But it is more complicated than that. If you’ve secured an A with all the advantages life can throw at you, then bravo, bully for you. But if you’ve been able to tear a decent B grade from the education system with all of life set against you?

Well, put it this way: past performance isn’t always a good guide to future potential. And if you have a bit of social imagination, and a bit of empathy, you realise that not every A or B on a student’s transcript is the same.

So which is it to be? Whose demands are to be privileged? “Neither and both” is an opposition’s answer. A loser’s answer. The Scottish Tory answer. You can’t get away with that kind of craic in government. But it is just part of the Scottish Conservatives’ long and well-lubricated history of intellectual inconsistency.

As is becoming clear and clearer as the years of the Holyrood term tick by, Davidson’s leadership is emblematic of everything appalling about political columnists, journalists and ad men-turned-politicians. Too often, the essay deadline leadership they offer is superficial, cynical and faddish. None of these are adjectives Scottish politics needs.

SO let’s not emulate their mistakes. That’s just the politics. Not the essential question. Whoever was for it or against it, is national standardised testing for P1s a good idea or not? On the one hand, what counts is often what is counted.

How are we to ascertain that the attainment gap between the richest and the poorest in our society is closing, without some metrics to play with? But should we be embracing the idea of common examination – even a gentle examination – so early in a kid’s life? And even if we should, are the tests we’re running the tests we need?

On balance, I’m unconvinced either way. But it might be useful to clear up what we are – and are not – talking about. The word “test” might conjure up the image of early-years exam halls, patrolled by a taskforce of state-sponsored Rosa Klebbs putting the fear of God up the weeping weans. You imagine tots in short trousers, sobbing over exam scripts requiring them to use the word “discombobulated” in a sentence, or demanding they outline the principal features of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Bat away those fantasies. We aren’t talking about a close reading of the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid here.

Instead, Scotland’s four and five-year-olds are confronted by Alison – a cartoon togged out in sinister lavender, hair coiled like a gorgon’s nest of snakes. Swiping right and swiping left – useful life-skills, for the proto-internet daters of the future – our animated inquisitor confronts Scotland’s primary ones with mind-bending challenges to assess their literacy and numeracy, like identifying whether there is one apple on the screen, or two.

Fiendish puzzles like distinguishing a dog from a duck. Like Duolingo, but with fewer requirements to repeat “the yellow bear is eating the unhappy whale” in your best conversational German.

The idea this is harrowing Scotland’s schoolkids seems wildly overblown. But are we really generating useful, meaningful data here? And why can’t we talk about this sanely, instead of devolving into wild exaggerations?

I went to one of those secondary schools Scottish Tories are inclined to admire. Indeed, Davidson’s deputy – Jackson Carlaw – was a senior governor during my spell at Hutchesons’ Grammar.

The ruddy-faced rotarian would dance attendance whenever a Conservative parliamentarian took the opportunity to visit one of their few spiritual homes in Scotland, chortling deferentially at their off-colour jokes and generally playing the toady’s toady.

We were blazered. Conceited. Taught to talk up. Encouraged to think. Streamed to hell. And examined to death. If nothing else, the constant testing took the sting out of tests. But looking back, I’m less convinced about what it did for our brains. The discipline churned out sloggers. It fostered learners. But thinkers, reflectors, dissenting voices and original perspectives? I hae ma doots.