Ruth Davidson has battled through a crowd of Brylcreemed young male Tory activists, all desperate for a selfie with her, to sit down with BuzzFeed News on the floor in a quiet corner of the Conservative conference in Birmingham.
The Scottish Tory leader, whose drinks reception at the conference on Sunday night was so mobbed that hundreds of activists couldn't get in, is reminiscing about a time when she didn't have quite the same level of star appeal – her first Tory conference seven years ago.
"It was crazy, it was enormous," says Davidson, slightly hungover from the festivities from the previous night. "Because it was the last by-election before the general election, and I had to do this walk with the prime minister for the opening of the conference. I’d been a journalist before, but I’d never seen a press pack like it.
"David Cameron’s quite tall ... and I’m very short, and I was wearing heels, which I’m not very good at, but I wanted to look the part of what a politician looked like. It was the first time I’d done professional politics. I really struggled to keep up with him and I looked like a trotting pit pony."
Davidson, then the unknown leader of what seemed like the lost cause of the Scottish Conservatives, is now of as much interest to the conference crowd and the assembled media as any cabinet minister and has even been chosen to introduce the new prime minister, Theresa May, ahead of her speech on Wednesday.
After reviving her party in the Scottish election in May, overtaking Labour as the Scottish parliament's second biggest party, and playing a leading part in the UK-wide debate on EU membership, Davidson's appeal at the conference is obvious. Indeed, she seems to be followed by distinctively posh-sounding cheering from Tory activists wherever she goes.
"Because we’ve underperformed electorally for a number of years, it would have been quite easy for people within the UK Conservative party to just give up on us," says Davidson. "I’ve been coming to conference for years saying we can start making a breakthrough, we can come back.
"It would have been easy to ignore me or tell me I was talking nonsense. What’s nice at this conference is to be able to demonstrate that we’ve seen an uptake in our vote and we’ve doubled our seats at Holyrood. It’s nice to be able to demonstrate we’re repaying their belief."
Scottish Conservative MEP Ian Duncan, who has been attending the party conference since 2002, told BuzzFeed News the new interest in Davidson and the Scottish party has come as a shock to him. When he started attending conferences, the Scottish Conservatives were downcast and all but irrelevant.
"There really wasn’t a Scottish Tory party presence in any meaningful way," said Duncan. "You had the legacy of those who lost their seats – they were still around and had ambitions to return – but there was no great optimism that our situation would be improved upon in any speed.
"The Scottish reception traditionally had to serve free alcohol to attract people, but last night was a phenomenon like I’d never seen before. Ruth has become a phenomenon – that’s the big thing.
"Ruth is now on a par with the big beasts of the party, so when she slaps down Boris Johnson it’s peer-to-peer. It’s not a minor Scottish figure shouting down a funnel at someone very far away."
A senior member of party staff at the reception event said: "People only used to come to these events for a chance to get close to the prime minister, but if you look around you they're just as interested in Ruth now – as well as the booze. But people like victory, and she's the success story of this conference."
At the conference, Davidson hasn't shied away from throwing her newfound influence around, and has become an influential voice outside of the cabinet. On Sunday, she refused to say she has confidence in Johnson as foreign secretary, and she told BuzzFeed News she won't support May's flagship policy of reintroducing grammar schools in England.
"We’ve always had a separate education system in Scotland so the debate down south doesn’t really touch us," says Davidson. "For my part, I’ve had one local government election, a European manifesto, a general election manifesto, a Scottish manifesto – I’ve not put grammar schools in any of them and I’m not likely to put them in any manifesto as long as I’m party leader in Scotland."
May – or "Big T", as the Scottish leader calls her – turned up to Sunday night's reception to pay tribute to the Scottish Conservatives, telling Davidson: "You’ve done a fantastic job of raising the Conservatives in Scotland to the electoral victories we’ve had."
Davidson says she has a good relationship with May – whom she says is misrepresented in the media as a reserved character and is actually "really dry and quite funny" – and says May is more difficult for the SNP to attack than Cameron, because of her background.
"She’s a more difficult target for Nicola Sturgeon to hit," says Davidson. "A lot of the lazy attacks on David Cameron were over things he had no control over, accidents of birth. Theresa May is from a more modest background, and possibly because she’s a woman, and she’s got a long history of public service behind her."
However, the Scottish Tories haven't travelled south in completely happy circumstances. A vast majority of the party's MSPs backed remaining in the EU, and Davidson was chosen by the Remain side to represent it in the biggest TV debate of the campaign – where she won plaudits after accusing Johnson of lying about how much the EU costs the UK.
There is concern among the Scottish party that their pro-EU and pro-single market membership voices could be drowned out by those in the UK party demanding a so-called hard Brexit – the more severe option that May appeared to back in her opening speech on Sunday – but Davidson insists she is being consulted in the process.
"It’s been great to have sit-downs with Boris Johnson, David Davis, Liam Fox, as well as the prime minister [at the conference] to ensure I’m feeding into the process," she says. "One of the things I’ve been categoric about is the Scottish government has a role to play – both David Cameron when he was prime minister and Theresa May have said there should be proper consultation."
One Scottish Tory politician told BuzzFeed News he was frustrated that the party, which has put the union between Scotland and England at the centre of its message, won't have more of an influence in Westminster while Brexit is being negotiated: "When I was growing up a lot of Tory MPs in Scotland were critical of the government," said the politician.
He went on: "They would be very vocal. When we lost our MPs we missed that chorus of voices on certain issues – David Mundell [Scotland's only Tory MP] is just one man. Ruth and her MSPs are holding the government to account in Scotland but we need a lot more of that in Westminster."
One argument the Scottish Tories are confident they're winning, however, is the debate over Scottish independence. Party figures such as Mundell are pleased May has appeared "totally committed" to the union and praised her for criticising "divisive nationalists" in her speech on Sunday.
Davidson says Sturgeon has "misjudged" the mood in Scotland since the vote to leave the EU, saying: "I think [Sturgeon] must be feeling like she’s pushing a rock up a hill. It was premature to announce, within hours of the result, that she’d already instructed Scottish government officials to draft legislation for a referendum.
"The SNP changed its position over the summer and that demonstrates they don’t know which tack to take either. My advice to Nicola Sturgeon, at a time when lots of decisions have to be taken about Scotland’s future, let’s take the added uncertainty of a referendum off the table."
Duncan said Davidson's strength on the question of Scottish independence will continue to fuel her party's rise in the years to come, adding that it was feasible that the Scottish Tory leader could become first minister in 2021.
"Think back to when the SNP had fewer seats than we had now," said the MEP.
"Then they overtook Labour, then a minority and a majority government. It depends on the fortune of other parties, but the constitutional paradigm we’re looking at is unionist [versus] independent-minded. If you’re going to be unionist, you may as well be in the good bit of that and that’s the Conservative party."
Asked whether another independence referendum is "highly likely", as Nicola Sturgeon has said, Davidson says: "No, I don’t. I also think she doesn’t have the grounds to call one. The questions that Brexit throws up aren’t answered by leaving the United Kingdom."
After our interview, Davidson is heading to another dinner with her fans within the party. Her main concern at the conference where she's meeting and drinking with colleagues and delegates, she says, is that she might come down with scurvy like one Scottish Lib Dem politician once did.
"Alex Cole-Hamilton [Lib Dem MSP] is a serial campaigner and he got diagnosed with scurvy in one election – I don’t know why he told people but it’s true," she says.
"That’s always stuck with me so in my hotel room I have a punnet of grapes, a string bag of satsumas... My last meal before I left was a rainbow stir fry, and I stewed some rhubarb before I left.
"So that’s my top tip for conference – fruit."