DOUGLAS Ross is hardly a sympathetic character.
He’s quick to anger and rarely composed once the fuse has been lit.
His friends would try not to create situations where that temper might come out. Or so you’d think.
Someone ought to tell Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who this week effectively bloodied Ross’s nose then laughed in his face when he got upset about it.
The MP for Moray has not had a happy week. At a meeting of Conservatives in Westminster on Monday, the Scottish Tory leader is said to have nearly come to blows with the boss over refreshments in Rishi Sunak’s office.
Then he nearly started on Hunt (below) - or so the story goes - urging the pair to drop their plans to extend the windfall tax on oil and gas.
Ross is correctly worried about the impact this may have on Conservative support in Scotland. Recent polls have suggested that the Tories may actually survive north of the Border come the next election.
But not so in some of their south-east England heartlands. Hunt himself faces the serious prospect he could lose his seat in Surrey come the next election.
Aberdeenshire MP Andrew Bowie – also a minister in His Maj’s Government – would be one to worry if North Sea oil and gas companies felt the Tories were no longer onside.
He gamely railed against the measure alongside Ross (who conveniently is not bound by collective responsibility as Bowie is) before he was quickly dispatched to a re-education camp to revise the party line.
Sure enough, a few hours later, Bowie, once again a good comrade, tweeted that actually the Tories were the only party with a plan for the oil and gas sector (squeeze them for all they’re worth to fund the most minor of tax cuts).
Bowie added that the Chancellor “understood” his concerns about the Energy Profits Levy, without adding that Hunt's comprehension was closer to the way a joyrider “understood” the stop sign they had just barrelled past.
Ross has taken a bolder stance. Because extending the windfall tax requires a separate vote in Parliament, the Scottish Tory leader has the chance to rebel and vote against the measure, proving his bona fides with the North Sea energy sector.
Hunt may have decided to twist the knife a smidge more in the aftermath of the Budget, perhaps as a rebuke for Ross going tonto in the press about the Chancellor’s betrayal.
Asked who the biggest losers were from the Budget, Hunt replied it was non-doms and Scottish energy firms. He just about stopped himself from adding: Douglas Ross.
Speaking of losers, Theresa May (above) has announced she’ll be quitting politics at the next election.
Her record, for those who have forgotten include driving anti-immigrant vans in diverse areas; ratcheting up the hostile environment; presiding over the Windrush scandal; losing her majority in the worst electoral calculation ever which saw the Commons descend into chaos on a near daily basis as the Tory Party ripped themselves apart over Brexit and, err … running through fields of wheat.
She was of course showered with praise from the sort of people mentally weighing up whether she might agree to do a podcast series about how to move past division in politics.
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