RUTH DAVIDSON has led her party to become the second biggest at Holyrood, and from just one Westminster seat to 13. 

You could say the Scottish Conservatives are in an insurgent renaissance.

But you wouldn’t know it from their conference this weekend. The party made use of just a small section of the huge hall at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre. 

In the exhibition space, I found just a few third-sector organisations — the ones that will make a cursory effort at every political convention. 

The biggest excitement of Friday morning came from the discovery that an oyster catcher had laid three eggs on the window ledge of the press room. 

She’d better hide them before Theresa May arrives, I thought, or she’ll be forced to smash one to comply with the two-child benefit cap.

In her speech to the conference today, Davidson is expected to say: “I want to live in a country that ‘will,’ that ‘shall,’ that ‘can’ act, and can act right now.

“So we’re not fighting each other — but fighting for each other. We’ve got to get out of the trenches of the last decade: Yes and No, Leave and Remain — and work together to create a better nation for us all.”

So we’re in the now. The trouble is, the delegates seem more like remnants of yesteryear — and how long can the party maintain its electoral momentum if its brand is purely based on the persona of one charismatic individual?

In search of the Scottish Tories’ famed new youthful energy, I headed to a fringe meeting hosted by the Scottish Young Conservatives (SYC). 

The queue for the buffet looked indistinguishable from any other crowd at the conference, but the room was soon graced with sharp-suited 20-somethings — plus a few in tweed.

As I reported in the news pages today, the event was most notable for MP Luke Graham’s call for a shift away from environmentalism and equality in Scotland’s curriculum.

But surely that would still leave room for the party’s new talent to show us their exciting plans? 

Perhaps, but it was not a chance they took up. The youth section’s secretary Missy Bolt acknowledged that the party was “lagging behind Labour” in engaging young people. 

But the offer to voters was not just zero, but in minus numbers. Speakers attacked the SNP’s free university tuition policy, with education spokeswoman Liz Smith calling for a “graduate contribution.” 

This would not amount to “upfront fees” or a graduate tax, she insisted — but quite how it would differ was not explained.

Another suggestion from the panel was that a greater number of younger candidates and representatives would help convince the youth of their ideology. 

It’s significant that the word ideology came up — because Davidson does her best to distance herself from any semblance of it. 

But for all the appetite to create an equivalent of Momentum, young people’s engagement with Corbyn is not about the man, but what he represents.

And who knows quite what Ruth Davidson represents? Is it the socially progressive and media-savvy face she puts about — or her steadfast support for the most brutal of Tory policies? 

That’s the message of the digital advert Scottish Labour is launching today, which highlights Davidson’s support for the two-child benefit cap and the rape clause. 

“The truth about Ruth is that she is no different from her right-wing Tory colleagues like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg,” Scottish Labour deputy leader Lesley Laird says.

My personal highlight of the yoof fringe, however, had to be SYC executive member Orhan Ahmed speaking of the importance of savings and pensions to young people. 

There’s a “great” retirement development in San Francisco, he said, which “I’ve had my eye on for 20 years.” Normality corner.