David Mundell has been MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale since 2005, and for twelve of those years he was the only Conservative MP in Scotland. Survival is his defining achievement, and survival is not the same as influence.

Mundell held a Scottish seat for his party through the years when Scottish Conservatism was close to extinction, winning and holding ground that almost every colleague lost. In January 2016, while serving in the cabinet as Secretary of State for Scotland, he became the first openly gay Conservative cabinet minister, a quietly significant moment for a party that had spent the previous two decades on the wrong side of equal rights. He had a long apprenticeship before Westminster, a solicitor who became a senior figure at BT in Scotland and a member of the Scottish Parliament from 1999, and he reached the cabinet in 2015, the first Conservative Scottish Secretary since 1997. The endurance is genuine and the milestone is to his lasting credit.

Yet he held one of the most consequential briefs in the United Kingdom during the years it came under most strain, and left little imprint on it. He was Scotland Secretary from 2015 to 2019, through the aftermath of the independence referendum, the Brexit vote that Scotland rejected, and the rise of a constitutional argument his government had no answer to. Through all of it Mundell was a loyal transmitter of the London line rather than a force who shaped it. He began as a member of the SDP in the 1980s before returning to the Conservatives, fair enough in a long life, but the through line of the career is accommodation rather than conviction.

The clearest example came over Brexit. A Remain voter, Mundell joined Ruth Davidson in 2018 in threatening to resign if Northern Ireland was treated differently from the rest of the United Kingdom. The threat made headlines. He did not resign. When Boris Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, after Mundell had signalled how hard he would find it to serve, Johnson spared him the decision and sacked him on his first day. A minister who draws a line and then steps back from it teaches the people he is negotiating with exactly how much the line is worth.

Since then he has been a backbencher, took and gave up a trade envoy role to New Zealand in the 2022 collapse, and now sits on the International Development Committee. In 2024 he held his seat with a majority of 4,242 as the SNP fell back and Labour surged, a result owed as much to a split opposition as to his own pull.

Mundell is a genuine survivor and broke a real barrier for his party, and neither point should be diminished. He is also the embodiment of the durable minister who is present for history and absent from it, loyal to every leader and decisive for none.