Andrew Bowie has been MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine since 2017. He served in the Royal Navy before politics and grew up in the constituency he now represents. He is one of the few Scottish Conservatives still standing after the 2024 election, which compressed the parliamentary party to a single figure rump.

His ministerial work was in energy, where he had genuine subject knowledge. The North Sea oil and gas portfolio is one of the harder briefs in modern UK politics because the constituency interests, the climate commitments and the macroeconomic facts pull in different directions. Bowie defended domestic production against a Labour and SNP consensus that was pushing the other way, and he did it without retreating into the bad faith arguments that mark most political conversation about energy.

His political register is calm. He is one of the relatively few Conservatives of his cohort who managed to be a visible minister during the Johnson and Truss years without absorbing the reputational damage that consumed most of his colleagues. That is partly luck and partly a refusal to perform the theatrical anger that became the dominant mode of his parliamentary party.

The Scottish Conservative position is genuinely difficult. The party has to be unionist without being read as London imposed. It has to attack the SNP without sounding English. It has to distinguish itself from the UK Conservative leadership when that leadership becomes electorally toxic, while remaining inside the same party. The role demands constant balancing and rewards almost none of it. Bowie did the balancing more effectively than several colleagues and was returned in 2024 in a context where most of them were not.

The harder critique of his record is the same as for most of the Conservative cohort. He voted with the government through the cumulative damage of austerity, welfare reform and public service restraint. West Aberdeenshire is not uniformly affluent, and parts of it absorbed real economic damage during years he was inside the tent. The technocratic energy policy seriousness was useful but it was not a sufficient politics for the rest of the brief he carried.

There is also the residual question of what Scottish Conservatism becomes after the wipeout. The party has lost the Scottish parliamentary footprint that gave it national leverage. Holyrood remains its operating base, and Westminster representation will probably stay thin for years. Bowie is one of the few Westminster Scots Tories with the seniority and the manner to articulate what the party stands for in Scotland, if it decides to stand for anything beyond opposing the SNP.

He is more substantive than his media profile suggests. Whether the Scottish Conservatives become a recognisable political force again or remain a small unionist holding operation will partly depend on whether figures like him build something coherent or just manage the decline.