Blundering Tories have mistakenly promoted a former MP accused of sexual assault on a party leaflet in a battleground seat.
Douglas Lumsden replaced scandal-hit to contest Aberdeen South, but his leaflet on indyref2 refers to “Ross says”.
SNP candidate Stephen Flynn said:“The Tories have stumbled from one calamity to the next in Aberdeen, but they’ve really outdone themselves this time.
“For a campaign that is trying so hard to distance itself from Ross Thomson this is beyond embarrassing and shows that their new candidate can’t even get the basics right.”
Thomson, who ran Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign in Scotland, won the seat in 2017 and was expected to stand again next month.
However, his political career was ended after Labour’s Paul Sweeney accused him of sexually assaulting him in a Westminster bar.
Sweeney, who was with friends from Glasgow University, claimed a drunken Thomson tried to thrust his hand down his trousers:
‘I felt paralysed. It was just such a shocking thing. I was in a cold sweat, it was mortifying.’
‘In the back of my mind, I was thinking that if I just punched the guy, who knows where that could end up when there’s a bar full of journalists.
‘I couldn’t fight, so I took flight.’
Thomson, who denies the allegations, quit as a candidate on the same day the claims were published.
Johnson distanced himself from his erstwhile ally by welcoming the resignation and declining to say whether Thomson had been a good MP.
Lumsden, the co-leader of Aberdeen council, was announced as Thomson’s successor.
His leaflet to voters includes his picture and words in his own name, but the section on Labour ditching their total opposition to indyref2 contains a howling error.
It states: “Ross says, ‘This is a total betrayal of Labour voters who support Scotland staying in the UK and who thought that their party would stand by that position’.”
It was reported recently that Lumsden’s Twitter page had been deleted hours after he was selected.
Aberdeen South is considered to be a two horse race between the SNP and the Tories, who won with a majority of 4,752 two years ago.
Flynn added: “It’s no surprise the Tories have taken their eye off the ball. To them, Aberdeen South is just another pawn in Boris Johnson’s bid to force another right-wing, extreme Brexiteer, Westminster government on Scotland.”
A Scottish Tory spokesman said: “This is a simple production error.”
