Andy Hume graduated from Glasgow University, for whom he was a world champion debater and worked in both the public and voluntary sectors before taking a deep breath and finally entering the productive part of the economy. He was formerly the author of a well-known blog on Scottish politics, “Mr Eugenides”.

There are a few things about their party that all Scottish Conservatives know. They (or  we – I am a supporter, but not a member) know that once upon a time, the Conservatives won over 50% of the vote north of the border. We know that after this there was a slow decline in our fortunes until the coming of Mrs Thatcher, our devotion to whom our fellow Scots failed, unaccountably, to share; after that, things began to unravel for us electorally and we have yet to recover. We take it as an article of faith that if those fellow citizens could be weaned off the socialist teat that we have urged them for so long to renounce, Scotland’s prospects would be a lot brighter. This much we know; and this much I agree with, wholeheartedly.

But, perhaps above all, we remember 1992. Our valiant rear-guard campaign in that election has gone down as our finest hour; a latter-day Battle of Britain where we fought against all odds to save Conservatism in Scotland and succeeded stirringly (though in view of our later abandonment of the field, Dunkirk might be a better analogy). And if you ask Tories anywhere in Scotland, of whatever age, how this splendid achievement came about, you’ll get a near-unanimous answer. In the face of Labour talk of devolution, and the SNP’s ludicrous promise to make us “Free by ‘93”, it was John Major’s stout defence of the Union that saved the day. We stood up and declared, loudly, what we stood for, and the Scottish people, or at least a healthy proportion of them, responded. On this account, the sine qua non of the Conservative appeal to the electorate has to be a stalwart defence of the Union; it’s the first and strongest foundation on which any successful campaign has to be built.

I think this is a myth.

It is now accepted as fact that John Major’s focus on the constitutional issue saved our bacon in that 1992 campaign, but there is scant evidence for this. The unexpected Tory ‘success’ in that election was a nationwide phenomenon, not just a Scottish anomaly; polls pointed towards a Labour victory and the BBC were predicting a hung parliament as late as 10pm on the night. We defied expectations everywhere, not just in the corner of the kingdom where we made the Union a priority in our campaigning. And, of course, repeated trumpeting of our Unionist credentials did us no good in 1997 – or, indeed, in any election since then, including this year’s.

This is probably anathema to many readers of this website, but I submit that people in Scotland just aren’t that bothered about the Union. They don’t really care. In as far as it impacts on their thinking, they broadly agree with us, yes; Scotland has benefited greatly from its membership of the United Kingdom, and this is a constitutional arrangement that should remain in place. But then again most people largely agree with UKIP that we should disentangle ourselves from the European Union, yet they remain marooned in fringe-party status.

I can see through the monitor that you are shaking your head, so here’s a question for you. When was the last time you had a conversation about the Union with someone?  I don’t mean a fellow member of your local association, or another political blogger, or your candidate for the Holyrood elections: I mean a real person. Seriously, when was it? I hate to break it to you, but ordinary people talk about jobs, they talk about house prices (or waiting lists), they talk about gas bills, they talk about football. They do not talk about the constitution. They don’t look at Ruth Davidson on the TV screen in the pub and say, “I’ll give the Tories one thing; they’re sound on the Union”. In all my years, the only people outside the Conservative Party that I have ever heard talking with any passion about Britishness are fans of Rangers FC, a fine institution that is dear to my heart but not perhaps the optimal model for reaching out to the undecided neutral.

Indeed, I’d argue that the fact the electorate is in sympathy with us on the issue actually makes a constant focus on the Union less important, not more. Time and again, the Scottish people have told us, “Yes, we get it. You’re in favour of the Union. So are we. What else have you got?”. And answer there has usually come none. Just as with that issue in the 1990s, we risk becoming, as Michael Portillo once put it, “the pub bore” on this subject. David Cameron’s most effective put-down of the appalling Gordon Brown was that he was an analogue politician in a digital age; I’d argue that wearing our Unionism so brightly on our sleeves lays us open to the same charge. We sound anachronistic and faintly weird, like those red-faced Ulstermen who used to be on our TVs all the time, always upset about something.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing that Scottish Conservatives should be relaxed about the prospect of Scottish separatism, let alone support it. The day will come when the leader has to man the barricades in defence of the Union, sure enough and it may even come within this Parliament. But the brand of Unionism which says that we can make no concessions which allow Scotland to diverge at all from the rest of the country – a paleo-Unionism, if you like – didn’t work in 1997, it didn’t work in the subsequent devolution referendum, and it’s not working now. It makes it look like Tories are against progress and change, which any self-respecting Malcolm Tucker will tell you is electoral death. There is no point in drawing lines in the sand when the tide is against you.

Whoever the new leader turns out to be, I would argue that they need to put everyday issues at the heart of their appeal, not the defence of a Union which people don’t really believe is threatened anyway. They need to set out a coherent vision of a right-of-centre alternative in which the solution to our social ills is not incessant rises in spending, micro-meddling in people’s lives and the continuation of the failed leftist policies that have let down so many parts of this country. And this needs to be a real alternative to the left-wing consensus that utterly dominates political debate in Scotland, not the social democracy-lite that we seem to have sometimes espoused in recent years.

But they should also be reaching out to the kind of young professionals who in England would be natural Conservative voters – successful, suspicious of big government, unhappy at ever-higher taxes – but up here tend to gravitate elsewhere, usually to the SNP. To do this, they need, crucially, to be open to change – whether it’s coalition with other parties at Holyrood, or fiscal autonomy, a genuinely liberal stance on social issues, even the wholesale rebranding exercise that is now on the table in this leadership election – no matter how much that might upset some of the old dears who will be voting in it.

Above all, twenty years after our electoral fortunes were supposedly saved by putting the Union front and centre in our campaign, the first step to rebuilding those prospects should be for the new leader, whoever she or he is, to put their Unionism in a case marked “break glass in case of emergency” and leave it there until it is needed, and not before. In politics, it is not enough to be right; one must also be relevant.