Is Ruth Davidson too divisive a figure for Scottish rugby?

That’s £130 each, by the way.

What’s true of the participants of those two ball games is also true of their adherents, by and large. One of my more memorable and thought-provoking culture clash moments came as I was leaving Tynecastle Stadium in Edinburgh after a football match and heading towards Roseburn as a Scotland rugby international was going in at our (other) national stadium.

Sure there are football fans who also like rugby, and vice versa. Plenty of them. But in this case it was like oil and water, two tribes flowing in different directions and not likely to mix easily. Not so many Barbours on our side of the street as we headed for the chippy and the bus home.

Another way of reframing that (actually pretty terrible) joke is to say that, broadly, rugby is a middle-class sport and football isn’t. And before you write in to huff and puff, I know about Wales and the Borders and New Zealand. I know rugby in those places is more rooted in working communities, more democratic in nature.

But as business magazine Forbes found when it analysed the demographic make-up of the England national side in 2016, rugby is still predominantly the sport of the middle- and upper-middle classes. Indeed the magazine found that 54% of that year’s English Six Nations squad was privately educated. The corresponding number for the Scottish side was 48% and for Ireland a whopping 75%. The national average across the UK is seven per cent, though in Scotland only 4.2% of children are privately educated.

Paul Weller put it more succinctly in Eton Rifles, and with no recourse to pesky statistics. “All that rugby puts hair on your chest, what chance have you got against a tie and a crest?”

Enter Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, who has a crest (sort of: she’s a Conservative peer) and was raised in Selkirk, which is very much rugby territory. The perfect person, then, to join the board of Scottish Rugby Limited as a non-executive director.

Put in language a hooker or tighthead prop might understand, that means she is now supping at the same high table as the people who run the game in Scotland.

Ruth Davidson campaigning in a helicopter in 2016 (Image: Getty Images)

“As a lifelong Scotland fan, I am delighted to be joining the board of Scottish Rugby Ltd,” she said when her appointment was announced last Thursday. “From our community clubs through to the international teams, we have so much to be proud of, and so much further potential to be fulfilled.”

She added: “We have to match that potential with ambition and that means working collectively to ensure we are getting things right – from talent spotting to training, infrastructure to finance, safeguarding to leadership, to name but a few.”

By ‘getting things right’ is she implying Scottish Rugby may have been getting things wrong at points? Well, that was certainly the opinion of former board member Julia Bracewell who resigned in late 2022 citing discrimination. It was also the opinion of a review of the game’s governance structure. It found “situational bias” where the women’s game was concerned which, though “unconscious”, did indeed amount to discrimination.

No laws broken, though, so that’s alright.

As I see things, Baroness Davidson’s appeal has always been that she’s the Tory you could go for a pint with. Possibly even after a football match on your way to the chippy but certainly after a Six Nations game. That’s a rare quality when you consider some of the bampots she must count as political fellow travellers (the list is long, but Jacob Rees-Mogg always deserves a mention). Unlike them Baroness Davidson is not posh or entitled. She’s not one of those gammon-faced blokes who bangs on about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods being a government conspiracy, or how there are kids now self-identifying as cats and it’s all woke madness that needs to be stopped.

In fact she’s nothing like a Tory at all. She even has a football connection. Her dad was on the books of the mighty Partick Thistle FC for a spell in the mid-1960s (if you like rabbit holes, check out the relevant thread on the We Are Thistle fan forum: “She’s ok for a Tory”, “No she isn’t” etc.).

Former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson taking her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links on July 20, 2021 (Image: PA)

Hang on, though. This is still rugby we’re talking about, and those social and political fault-lines still exist. And Baroness Davidson is enough of a Tory for hackles to rise among those on the political left who like rugby but don’t like her and who are therefore upset at her presence at the sport’s top table.

Furthermore – and despite my best efforts to make the whole rugby vs football thing a clean binary option – there are probably plenty of fans of the beautiful game who don’t like rugby but whose ballot box preferences lean blue. The Venn diagram which could cope with it all would be like an Olympic flag on acid. Suffice to say the picture is messy.

What is clear is that her appointment is generally pretty divisive. Predictably opposition to it has been seized upon by the right-leaning press and used to have a pop at independence supporters.

“Nats in meltdown as Ruth Davidson is appointed to Scottish Rugby board” howled the Scottish Daily Express, having dug up huffy tweets of the ‘Never will I set foot in Murrayfield or watch any Scotland internationals while that woman is in the building’ variety. Meanwhile in the Sun: “Has the SRU gone raving mad? Terrible decision.” That’s not the paper’s editorial position, by the way, just another social media user they’ve quoted who is unhappy at the decision.

That said, the sense of angst is real. A Remove Ruth Davidson From Scottish Rugby petition has been raised on the website Change.org, and at the time of writing has attracted 824 signatures. Enough to win an encouraging ‘gaining momentum’ raised fist icon. The petition lists five reasons why the Blue Baroness should be given the boot, among them Conflict Of Interest (“she holds strong political biases that may influence decision-making”) and Impact On Public Perception (she is, the petition notes, “a politically polarizing figure”).

READ MORE: GOOD LUCK KEEPING POLITICS OUT OF SPORT

There’s also a Twitter poll, which is always a fun way to spend a couple of seconds. Of the 1011 people who took the time to vote, 88% answered No to the question: ‘Will you attend Scottish rugby games while Ruth Davidson remains as part of the SRU operation board?’

Democracy in action, folks.

But will see protests outside the ground following the next Scotland international? Will the Barbour-jacketed, Saltire-faced fans chant ‘Sack the board’ or hold up placards in between volleys of Flower Of Scotland and whatever other encouraging noises rugby fans make?

Unlikely. The date may have little bearing, but my sense is it will have all blown over by the time the football season starts.