THERE is a view, comforting no doubt to the parties who commanded three-quarters of the vote at the last Holyrood election, that the Conservatives on less than 17% were still unloved and unforgiven for the Thatcher era.

Blaming the grocer's daughter from Lincolnshire is an easy position to take in Scottish politics. The rubric runs: Conservative Government, miners' strike, poll tax, Tory oblivion. Easy, no doubt comforting, but not entirely true.

Margaret Thatcher was a conviction Conservative, utterly unafraid to tell her opponents her views. In her third term – yes, this was late in her Downing Street days – she had the courage to face that most socially liberal of bodies in modern times, the General Assembly of the Kirk.

"Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform," she argued, to a mixture of shuffling discomfort and surly discontent. The Moderator's gift to her was a Kirk report on housing and poverty. How unlike the issues of the day a quarter of a century later.

But she did not say in her 1988 Sermon on the Mound that there was no such thing as society. That was in an interview with Women's Own magazine. The two events, the speech to the Kirk and the speech to Middle England, tend to be conflated.

Mrs Thatcher, as it still seems right to call her, started her days as candidate for the Conservative Party leadership as a believer in individualism and never lost it.

No doubt this did, indeed, cost her party electorally north of the Border, but it would be a mistake to imagine her leadership and premiership were defining moments in Conservative decline in Scotland.

In fact, the graph of Conservative decline ran at around 10 points a decade from the peak in 1955, recovering briefly in the late-1970s before sliding again to its current bedrock of around 18%.

Against that backdrop it is absurd to say Mrs Thatcher was a key cause of Conservative decline, a claim that Alex Salmond repeated yesterday.

The problem for the Tories isn't Maggie. It's the problem of a mixed political supermarket, where natural Tories have too many aisles to shop in – the right wing of the SNP; the social conservatives of Labour, enhanced by the Blair era; even a LibDem offer, especially now they are coalition partners at UK level.

Did Mrs Thatcher's style and ethos run counter to Scottish thinking? Mr Salmond argued that view yesterday, yoking together seamlessly, the miners' strike, the poll tax, the Sermon on the Mound and the "no such thing as society" comment.

The miners' strike had a big impact within the trade union movement, but they were anti-Tory anyway. Much the same could be said of the poll tax, although a recent bedroom tax campaigner argued that both these issues brought in people who could afford to pay in support of those who could not.

But even if the bedroom tax and other onslaughts on welfare kindle antagonism among Scots, do people still link this to the Thatcher era? The linkage is probably more real than imagined.

When the SNP tried to sell the idea of "a penny for Scotland" – the notion of foregoing a one penny cut in standard income tax to create public investment – the party died at the polls.

So much for altruism and a belief in the idea of Jock Tamson's bairns.

The next time the SNP came back in 2007 they argued for a council tax freeze and repeated that pledge in 2011, arguably moves that resonate with the Conservative bedrock.

So the problem for the Scottish Conservatives isn't Mrs Thatcher's legacy for their movement. It's the fact the membership remains entirely devoted to someone who is now a historical figure and has not fully embraced its own future.

Murdo Fraser, someone who I think would be happy to be called a Thatcherite, wanted rid of Downing Street control. His problem was that his enemies in the Scots Tory hierarchy continue to regard the baroness as a goddess and London control as the natural order.

Ruth Davidson is about as much a Maggie groupie as it is possible to imagine, yet she cannot escape being a captive of a London party determined not to swallow the Murdo medicine.

It would be impossible, and wrong, to ask Scots Tory friends to forget Margaret Thatcher. But some time soon they are going to have to find their own, distinctive way forward.

Maybe they will argue once more that individuals matter more than society, or that Christianity is about redemption, not social reform. Maybe they will argue something new. Whatever, they will have to change and adapt to become less of a minority sport, and Margaret Hilda Thatcher will no longer be a millstone, real or imagined.