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.