By Steve Bargeton, political editor

THE NEW leader of the Scottish Tories yesterday warned colleagues that anyone caught being plotting against her would feel the full force of her handbag.

As the only candidate to succeed David McLetchie, Annabel Goldie was formally confirmed in the job which she sealed with a kiss from her new deputy—Mid Scotland and Fife MSP Murdo Fraser.

Last weekend MSP Brian Monteith resigned the Tory whip after admitting suggesting to a newspaper editor that he run an editorial calling for Mr McLetchie to stand down.

And last night as his former colleagues met to discuss his fate he announced that he had quit the party “with immediate effect.”

In a letter to his local Tory association in Stirling, Mr Monteith said he intended “for the moment” to stay on at Holyrood and intended to remain a member of Holyrood’s audit committee, of which is convener.

“Taking these two points into consideration it is clear that I am firstly depriving the Scottish Conservative Party of a third official Member of Parliament for mid-Scotland and Fife region, and secondly, that I am depriving the 17-strong group of Scottish Conservatives at Holyrood of a member of the audit committee,” he said.

“I do not think it proper that I can remain a member of the party while such an arrangement exists so I must tender my resignation with immediate effect.”

Mr Monteith (47), a Tory member for 29 years, said, “You can’t take the conservatism out of the boy—but the boy can take himself out of the Conservatives.”

One of Miss Goldie’s first tasks as leader was to address her group of 17 MSPs at Holyrood last night.

Her message to them could not have been more clear—“unite or face oblivion.”

“I think you may take it matron’s handbag will be in hyper-action,” she said at a press conference following her confirmation as leader.

“What I’m going to make crystal clear is that I’m not prepared to tolerate the kind of nonsense that has gone on.”

She said the choice for Scottish Tories as they approach the 2007 Holyrood elections was stark.

“Either the indiscipline, disloyalty, and the frankly degrading and unprepossessing spectacle of that conduct continues, and we face oblivion.”

“Or we get behind one another, shoulder to the wheel, we prepare to take to the people of Scotland what I think is a new and fresh Conservative image.

“We take this message to the people of Scotland—that there is a devolution which can work and is a devolution which is not the profligate example we have seen.

“And we can, by doing all that, persuade Scottish voters that there is an alternative when they are voting for MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.”

Giving her assessment of the state of the party in the wake of months of negative press surrounding her predecessor’s taxi expenses, Miss Goldie said, “The wheels are back on the wagon—and I’m the nag hitched up to tow it.

“There will of course be Apache raids, but at least they will no longer be starting from within the wagon.

“And I have every confidence in Mr Fraser riding shotgun to deal with them.”

Asked if she saw herself in the mould of that other handbag swinging Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, Miss Goldie said, “There could be worse precedents to follow.

“But I like to think of myself as just me and I have been at pains to make that clear—I’m just me.

“There may at times be echoes of a former presence in Scotland, but I don’t think you will find that presence is re-enacted in every way in Scotland.”

Looking ahead she said that she would direct her efforts towards “a workable and sensible reality” of the dream which many Scots had voted for in the devolution referendum.

“To many voters that dream in the hands of Labour and the Liberal Democrats has turned to the ashes of profligacy, a parliament building more concerned with pampering the inmates than serving the people, and of failure as throughout our communities hospital departments closed, NHS dentists disappear and criminals seem to have more rights than victims,” she said.

“Is this really the Scotland envisaged by the architects of devolution? I bet it wasn’t.”

She said the Tories would continue their thinking about ways of cutting the size of government, finding savings in the public sector, and coming forward with a tax-cutting agenda for 2007.

Miss Goldie said the party should have the “totally achievable” goal of becoming the biggest opposition party in the Scottish Parliament in 2007, eclipsing the SNP.

“To be the biggest opposition party brings with it influence, authority and clout,” she said.