"The people of Scotland said we got it wrong," admits Mr David McLetchie in the opening sentence of his manifesto.
"They said we were out of touch. We didn't listen; that our decisions and policies had London stamped all over them, with little relevance or sympathy for their needs. Our history is indelibly marked with the 1997 election defeat."
It was a humble way to open an election campaign yesterday in Edinburgh. But in the eyes of Scottish voters, the Tories have much to be humble about.
Now they are back in the electoral fray, struggling at around 10 per cent of the vote in opinion polls, and frustrated at being treated as either pariahs or irrelevant to the May 6th election for the first Scottish parliament in 292 years.
The Tory aim is merely to regain a toehold in Scottish politics, after the devastating result two years ago which saw them reduced to an English-only rump in the House of Commons. After 18 years of running Scotland, they had no MPs and no Euro-MPs.
They had gerrymandered local government to give themselves a local power base, yet won control of none of the councils they had created.
Their hope lies, in one of the glorious ironies of politics, in a parliament they opposed setting up, and in a proportional electoral system against which they argued strenuously.
But with only 10 per cent in the polls, and resentment still widespread in the electorate, even that may not be enough to save them from extinction.
For 18 years the Tories had complete control of the reins of central government, but with a diminishing share of the vote, falling from 27 seats when they took power to 11 in 1992 and none five years later.
Battling for Mrs Thatcher's free-market economics in an increasingly hostile environment, they tried out the notorious local poll tax on Scots before the English, and tore themselves apart 10 years ago in a fierce battle between moderates and rightwingers.
That tension remains. Mr McLetchie is almost a caricature of the grey, sober, under-stated Edinburgh tax lawyer, but his politics are radical.
The manifesto launched yesterday featured a sweeping away of health boards - the means by which Tories appointed supporters to run the health service for 18 years.
They also want to take schooling out of local authority control and hand it to parents.
They aim to be seen as the anti-tax party. Having won the backing of 500,000 voters - 20 per cent of the electorate - two years ago they reckon there is still a block of people out there who want a rightwing party which appeals to traditional Scottish values of self-reliance and limited state power.
Tories promise to be the defenders of the Union, trying to define a new, modernised form of unionism which allows diversity but does not threaten to split the UK. Indeed their name, after much internal reform over the past two years, remains the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, which derives from the party's Irish preoccupation at the start of the century.
The party used to have solid Protestant support, linking the landed power elite with the Orange working class, and being the only party this century to win more than half the Scottish vote, in 1955.
Since then sectarian voting has all but disappeared from Scottish politics. That the grand master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland is a Tory candidate for a local council seat in West Lothian next month is now seen as something of a curiosity.
When the Protestant working class vote deserted them, all they were left with was a middle class, business vote. And they maintain disproportionate financial clout. A recent fund-raising dinner attracted 800 people.
The credit for raising more money this year than the front-running Labour and Scottish National parties put together belongs to Mr Irvine Laidlaw, a Scottish millionaire businessman based in Monaco and London. He has paid for staff and a helicopter for Mr McLetchie's campaign, while other parties use buses.
The Scottish Tories have had to dust themselves down and start again.
But the imminence of an election has at least focussed minds. Without that, the Tories led by Mr William Hague in London are still struggling to find a voice, faring dismally in opinion polls, with no clear direction, and particularly confused about how they want to tackle constitutional change.
They will not admit it, but they have virtually given up any hope of winning back power in 2002. And without the SNP to threaten Labour in the rest of the UK, that means that Mr Blair's party is - Serbia allowing - on course for at least another term.