'There were plenty of brave faces in Troon ... the Scottish Tories have had a lot of practice at weathering adversity. But beneath the surface there was undisguised dismay'

And the Scottish Tories in Troon even took a bit of a beating from their own leader. David Cameron gave them a dressing down for their failure to make any political progress in Scotland – one MP and 15% in the polls. He told them they were too "timid" about Tory values; and that the "hand-wringing" had to stop. Cameron called on timid Tories to connect with their natural constituency – the "grafters", the "risk-takers", "the Glasgow entrepreneurs" who have lost the habit of voting Conservative. "The pensioner in Yorkshire," said the PM, "votes Conservative because he knows we will look after every pound of taxpayers' money. Too often the pensioner in Perthshire, with the same belief in sound money, rejects us."

And, er, whose fault is that? The Perthshire pensioner this weekend is more likely to be bemoaning the loss of age-related personal allowances than celebrating the abolition of the 50p tax band. And anyway, money isn't exactly sound with inflation still at 4%.

Those pensioners have seen their savings destroyed by near-zero interest rates, and their standard of living crushed by rising prices. What makes Cameron think this will incline them to vote Tory in Perthshire or anywhere else? In Troon, a well-heeled seaside town devoted to golf and guest houses, the elderly were hardly out in force for the Tories. I walked the length of the strand and found only one couple who actually admitted to living here. The rest were day-trippers from Glasgow bemused by the massive police presence which made it look as if the entire town had been occupied by dayglo traffic wardens.

As for your Glasgow entrepreneur, he or she is too worried about not being able to get a loan from the bank to bother about voting Conservative. Precious few of them earn anywhere near £150,000 – at least the honest ones – so why should they be grateful for a Budget that has rewarded around 400,000 people mostly living in the southeast of England?

The First Minister told MSPs on Thursday that there are only 15,000 people in Scotland earning enough to qualify for the now-abolished 50p tax band, but I suspect that's an over-estimate. When I asked the Scottish Government statistical service how many Scots earn more than £150,000 they replied that the numbers were too small to measure. Only 26,000 Scots earn more than £100,000 a year – a surprising number of them in the public sector. And the Scottish Tories shouldn't look for gratitude from home-owners either for liberating them from the threat of the dreaded "mansion tax".

Last year, only 10 houses in Scotland were sold for more than £2 million, the figure at which the LibDem-inspired mansion tax was supposed to hit home. I'm sure those Scottish mansion-dwellers are grateful for being exempted from a property surtax – but there are hardly enough of them to generate a Tory revival north of the Border, and many of them don't even live here. The presentational problem for the Scottish Tories is they look like a party of plutocrats canvassing for votes in a low-wage political culture. They aren't, of course – most Scottish Tories aren't even rich. But it's hard to dispel this image when they are umbilically linked to the party of George "I-don't-earn-it-either" Osborne. Aspiration is all very well, but it needs to be tempered by reality.

There were plenty of brave faces in Troon – the Scottish Tories have had a lot of practice at weathering adversity. But beneath the surface there was undisguised dismay at the "granny tax" headlines in Friday's Daily Mail. It's the Tory-supporting papers that have been most ferocious in condemning what they call the worst budgetary own-goal since Gordon Brown abolished the 10p tax band in 2008. After all, the Scottish Tories are the party of the grannies – the average age of their 11,000 membership is well into bus-pass territory.

David Cameron didn't try to defend the abolition of the personal allowances that currently exempt the first £10,500 of a pensioner's income from tax. He promised instead the "biggest ever increase in the basic state pension", £5.30 per week, to fatten pensioners' wallets next month. However, even this came apart within hours when the Treasury confirmed that this increase would only maintain the existing value of the state pension after allowing for inflation. In other words, there is no increase at all, yet pensioners will be losing real-terms cash in their age-related allowance. Not so much a stealth tax as a stealth giveaway – so small you can't actually see it.

Of course, this Tory conference was supposed to be about a much more important issue than tax: the future of this great nation of ours, the UK. Troon was billed as the launch of the Friends Of The Union campaign. The former leader of the Scottish Tories, Annabel Goldie, promised a "cornucopia of constitutional glitterati", which turned out to be Lord Strathclyde, Baroness Warsi and – a wild card this – David Trimble, former leader of the Ulster Unionists. I don't know if his presence was designed to suggest the SNP should be compared with Irish nationalists, but Trimble made the connection directly. "It is doing violence to people's sense of identity," he said, to rob them of their Britishness. He added that since the end of the civil war, support for nationalism in the province had fallen dramatically, and only one in four Northern Irish citizens now wanted to leave the UK. The SNP leapt on this as another Tory own-goal.

It was turning into a bit of a horror show. Ruth Davidson, the new and impossibly youthful leader of the Scottish Tories, did her best to inject a bit of life and optimism – a sense of history. "The next thousand days," she announced, "could determine the future of the country for the next thousand years." She promised to work with Labour, the LibDems and wider civic Scotland to fight off Alex Salmond's thousand-year reign. Mind you, non-Tories were conspicuous by their absence in Troon. The Labour MP Brian Donohoe, who'd suggested he might join the Tories on a pro-Union platform, didn't turn up.

Davidson is a competent speaker, but she looks like a school debating champion who's been allowed to address the grown-ups. She is such a contrast to the crusty cohort of Tory representatives, you have to remind yourself she is actually their leader.

It's too early for actual sniping at Davidson, but I heard very few plaudits from Tory MSPs in the tearoom at Troon, apart for the obligatory praise for her speech. People are waiting for her to deliver something distinctive in policy terms, other than her abandonment of Tory opposition to minimum pricing of alcohol, now that the policy has been adopted by the UK leader, David Cameron.

Davidson believes the Tories can become relevant again by winning the battle against separatism. But that is going to be a pretty crowded field and it is presumptuous to assume that the Tories are in some way the natural party of Unionism. The problem for the Friends Of The Union is there is little friendship between Labour and the Tories or the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. For their own reasons the other Unionist parties will want to keep the Scottish Conservatives at arm's length, aware that the Tory connection is the least likely to endear Scots to the United Kingdom. Especially after this Budget, which seems to speak of two nations.

And still there is no clarity about what the Tories are offering as an alternative to independence. David Cameron said he was "open-minded" about "new powers" over and above those in the Scotland Bill, which finally passed through Parliament last week. But only if Scots are good little boys and girls and vote "No" in the referendum. A number of Scottish Tories, including some quite senior ones, simply don't believe this is a viable position. "Scots are going to want to know what is on offer," says the Tory MSP and former Presiding Officer, Alex Fergusson. We are still none the wiser. And if no answers are forthcoming, the Tories could lose any purchase on the greatest political question facing this generation of Scottish voters.