The Conservatives decisively beat the Scottish National Party in the Aberdeen South by-election Friday morning — after weeks of hammering the ruling Scottish Party over restrictions on oil and gas drilling. The Tories overturned a more than 3,000-vote majority in the Scottish seat, a thumping Conservative win — and their first
Matt Honeycombe-Foster, Nicholas Earl
The Conservatives bagged 14,308 votes to the Scottish National Party’s 8,258.
The victory is a rare boost for Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, whose party was ejected from national office in 2024 and has been challenged from the right by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The Tories threw significant weight behind making the Aberdeen South by-election a referendum on drilling in the North Sea.
Badenoch has moved the Tories sharply away from green policies, ditching the net-zero targets her party created and embracing the oil and gas industry.
“The industry is the economic lifeblood of the north east,” Badenoch said during the campaign, before laying into the Westminster Labour government’s “ban on new drilling, backed by the SNP.”
