THE much anticipated Tory surge was expected to include the re-emergence of working class Unionism. But the locations for a number of the party's victories are as striking for their recent and more distant pasts.

Thomas Kerr was the first shock of the day, winning a seat in Shettleston in Glasgow's east end. It had been a Tory target, the party seeing at grassroots where some of that Labour vote was shifting.

Synonymous with deprivation statistics and low life expectancy (in reality brought down by nearby Dalmarnock and Calton with which it shared a Westminster constituency), it was the home of much of Glasgow's heavy industry.

But it also contains the affluent ghetto of Mount Vernon and the aspirational and settled working class Sandyhills. With a tradition of cultural Unionism in the area it was in fact ripe for a Tory target.

Closer to the city centre, the Calton ward has no such socially mixed demographic and was until recently home to swathes of brownfield sites, the legacy of the city's industrial past. It has the dubious distinction of a male life expectancy in the 50s.

But it does have Bridgeton, an area synonymous with strident support for the Union and a culture of Orangeism. Robert Connelly almost certainly benefited from Labour second preferences going to the Tories, all fair game in the STV system.

Like his colleague in Shettleston, Mr Connelly is barely in his 20s and too young to recall the era of the Tory Bogeymen in Scotland. Its another area where the ghosts of Thatcherism have given way to a surge in support for Unionism barely imaginable even earlier this week.

Perhaps most symbolic was the election of 24-year-old Meghan Gallacher to Ravenscraig, long a symbol of the slow death of Scottish industry and where fingers where pointed at the Thatcher and Major governments.

Ms Gallacher talked of how she had been born after the plant had closed, in 1992, and how the Tories were now moving forward and had become acceptable in places where before the independence referendum they would have feared to tread.

Again, Cummnock in East Ayrshire fits the bill of depressed, former industrial town still suffering from the collapse of mining as the heart of its communities.

Surrounded by affluent farmland there are other dynamics at play, but Walter Young joined the ranks of the former industrial heartland Tories who have been the surprise element of the 2017 council elections.

Elsewhere, Midlothian, home to the national mining museum, the Tories have gone from no seats to five. Larkhall, another former industrial town with a reputation for robust working class unionism, returned its first Tory candidate in many years.