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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article