RUTH Davidson lives life at a frenetic pace, burning Saudi Arabian quantities of midnight oil, fuelled by equal volumes of Diet Coke. The journalist in her means nothing is urgent until it’s bang up to deadline and a couple of hours is always plenty of time.

With the launch of a key education paper at the heart of the Scottish Conservatives’ election strategy, this week it was back to hectic business as usual. But in the midst of it was a curve ball arising from an interview she gave to the Sunday Telegraph in which she spoke about leadership, and her hope that a successful candidate to succeed David Cameron would come from the fresh faces of the 2010 intake, expressing particular admiration for Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb.

She then had to use an extensive article on the Conservative Home website to clarify her comments, and to flesh out her thoughts on leadership in case anyone thought she was setting herself against any of the current front runners.

If there was a stir about the interview it was only internal, but it was enough for her to spend a considerable amount of time dealing with the fall-out, however inconsequential it was to the wider world. But the interview and her follow-up do have significance for the Scottish political landscape.

Both articles are typically direct, in which she speaks about the loneliness of leadership and of the importance of selflessness, quoting Field Marshall Slim’s advice that effective leaders should “last – and last all the time – you will put your own interest, your own safety, your own comfort.”

My experience of working with her was there was never any doubt personal comfort was her last priority and no matter how hard we tried to manage her workload, with a crammed diary the midnight oil was regularly burnt.

Confident, energetic, popular and happy, she presents to the world as a woman with the political world at her feet, now regularly starring in “Ones to Watch” features and encouraged to seek her political fortune at Westminster when she feels her time at Holyrood is up.

Amidst all the plaudits, it should not be forgotten just how bitter the fall-out of her victory in the 2011 leadership contest with Murdo Fraser became. Murdo and his acolytes could not accept – and still don’t – that they screwed up by promising to break up the party and opened the door for the upstart who had only been an MSP a matter of weeks.

Her Conservative Home article is brutally honest about this: “When I ran for the leadership, it was not in my best interests. I would have benefited both professionally and personally from learning my trade on the backbenches, not making my inevitable mistakes in the full glare of the public gaze.”

By the time I joined her team in June 2012 the whispering campaign against her was in full swing and finally reached its climax with intensive briefing against her in the run-up to the 2013 Stirling conference. I can well remember the furtive, shame-faced look on the face of the MSP we knew had been the messenger after a particularly nasty attack.

It bothered us more than it bothered her, but in the space of four months the situation had changed dramatically. A skilfully-conducted re-shuffle followed by a barn-storming speech at the UK party conference put her firmly in control.

Two years on, with her debating skills given a regular airing in televised referendum debates and enthusiastic General Election photo-ops which kept on the right side of cheesy, the job of Scottish Conservative leader is seemingly hers as long as she wants it.

There is a chance the Conservatives might, just might, pip the collapsing Labour Party into second place and with the new taxation powers on their way to Holyrood new possibilities open up for which her eye for detail is well suited.

Tellingly, she has this to say: “Doing everything I could to stop the break-up of Britain has become my guiding mission in politics. I fear that mission still has some years to run.”

This suggests that even if the Tories mark time in May, she is not about to step back, but the debate about the future of the Scottish party could re-open.

So would those Scottish Tories who still harbour a desire for their own party have the courage to break cover and take her on? At a time when the focus should be on how the Scottish Government uses its new powers, it would be a catastrophic mistake if they did.

John McLellan is a former director of communications for the Scottish Conservatives