![Deputy Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party Meghan Gallacher](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2024/07/14/TELEMMGLPICT000333766955_17209884283180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqd2YoQY3XRytG6zBmMwBxdH7L2GI39Rzi52FobiMZ1dY.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘Rising star’ raised in council house considering bid for Scottish Tory leadership
Meghan Gallacher said party must find a way to appeal to urban areas, younger voters and families
![Deputy Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party Meghan Gallacher](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2024/07/14/TELEMMGLPICT000333766955_17209884283180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqd2YoQY3XRytG6zBmMwBxdH7L2GI39Rzi52FobiMZ1dY.jpeg?imwidth=680)
A Tory “rising star” raised in a former council house is “actively considering” running to be the party’s next leader in Scotland.
Meghan Gallacher, the party’s deputy leader at Holyrood, has claimed the Tories need to find a way to appeal to people in urban areas and to younger voters and families.
Russell Findlay, the party’s justice spokesman and a former journalist, is seen as the leadership frontrunner and is expected to confirm his candidacy soon.
Allies of Murdo Fraser, who is on holiday in the United States, also expect him to stand on a platform of having a looser relationship with the UK Conservatives or severing formal ties altogether.
However, Ms Gallacher, a 32-year-old mother of a young daughter, suggested that she could appeal to a wider section of the electorate in an early pitch for the leadership.
At the weekend, she said she was “unapologetic when I say that we need a centre-Right party that wants to win in the central belt, as well as rural Scotland”.
She claimed the Scottish Tories needed to learn how to win outside of the Borders and north-east heartlands.
Setting out her economic plans to The Telegraph, she backed radical measures to encourage women into work and to set up their own businesses, with the aim of driving economic growth.
![Russell Findlay is considered to be frontrunner in Scottish Tory leadership race](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2024/07/14/TELEMMGLPICT000383284099_17209885059690_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqN7kF8Fb6ID_G1m99xXXMy15NUcTKNHKqy85KLqtvPLE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
“I believe the economy must be front and centre of the debate to elect the next leader of the Scottish Conservatives,” she said.
“Women are essential to growing the economy, but are too often facing economic disadvantage.
“We face systemic barriers to climbing career ladders and starting a business, with the system too often incentivising part-time work and low-paid jobs. That’s what I want to see change.”
Ms Gallacher is from a working class area in North Lanarkshire and was raised in a former council house close to the Ravenscraig steelworks, which was shut down in 1992 in what both Labour and the SNP claim was a sign of Tory disdain for Scottish industry.
She has said both of her parents backed for Scottish independence but she came to the realisation that she was a Tory due to the influence of her grandmother, a lifelong Conservative.
Ms Gallacher said she “can’t see any benefit” to the Scottish Tories breaking away from the UK party.
‘A new relationaship’
However, she said a new leader should “establish a new relationship” and that the Scottish Tories had “more clout in the UK party than we have been prepared to use in the past”.
Miles Briggs, a Tory MSP, revealed on Sunday that he had gone off the idea of a breakaway Scottish centre-Right party, which he previously supported.
He said he believed the proposal would damage prospects for the next Holyrood election, less than two years away.
Mr Briggs, the Scottish Tory housing spokesman, said he would support Mr Findlay should he confirm his leadership bid.
Writing in the Scottish Mail on Sunday, Mr Findlay claimed the Scottish Parliament had “become a prisoner of the sectional interests of MSPs and powerful lobbyists pushing their own agendas and peculiar priorities” such as the hate crime law.
He criticised the SNP’s “handout culture” and backed an “honest debate” over “the nature and affordability of government programmes in Scotland”.
Mr Findlay added: “Bridging the increasing disconnect between the governing class in Scotland and the people needs to be our priority.
“I don’t want to ‘smash the system’, I’m a conservative after all. But I do want to give it a right good shake.”