A Scottish MEP has taken third spot in the new rankings at the European Parliament.

Struan Stevenson, one of two Scottish Conservative representatives at Brussels and Strasbourg, won the placing within the centre-right grouping to which the Tories belong.

He is second vice-president until the next elections for the 784 seats in the European legislature in 2009. The presidency has been won by French MEP Joseph Daul while Marianne Thyssen of Belgium will be number two.

The decision comes five years after David Martin, Scottish Labour's lead MEP, was senior vice-president. Mr Stevenson's success may have been helped by his hard fight to keep British Conservatives within the alliance.

While running for the Tory leadership, David Cameron had promised to remove Tories from the centre-right grouping because its other members were seen from London as too positive about the constitution and the euro currency.

But Mr Stevenson argued publicly that such a move would force UK Tories to sit with "a ragbag of fascists and outcasts", which included Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, Alessandra Mussolini, the neo-fascist Italian, and Robert Kilroy-Silk, the British TV presenter.