The seat's voters stretched across the north of the
Perth and Kinross local council area in Scotland. It was an affluent, predominantly rural seat with notable livestock, salmon, fishing, hospitality, tourism and fruit-growing sectors. In its south, around the
River Tay is
Perth and its adjacent villages. Perth includes a mix of affluent middle-class suburbs to the south-west and more deprived areas around its north. Notwithstanding the possibility of breakthrough national and local campaigns and developments, campaigns to date had produced a close-run two-candidate contest as to most of the votes between the Conservative and the Scottish National Parties' candidates. During the main forerunner seat's existence (
Perth and East Perthshire, created in 1950), it returned MPs loyal to the
Unionist Party and the Conservative and Unionist Party after the parties amalgamated in 1965. The seat was one of eleven in Scotland to elect an SNP MP to Parliament at the
1974 October general election. With a rearrangement (
redistribution) of seats in
1979 the successor seat of
North Tayside went on to return Conservative candidate
Bill Walker to Parliament until he was defeated by
John Swinney of the SNP at the
1997 UK general election - from that point onwards the seat elected successive SNP members as its MP. The Conservatives narrowly missed out on gaining the seat at the
2005 UK general election: Douglas Taylor coming behind Pete Wishart by 1,521 votes. Wishart increased his majority such as with 9,641 votes clearance in
2015. The Conservative missed out on gaining the seat by 21 votes at the
2017 general election, the third-closest result in the nation after
North East Fife and
Kensington, but ahead of Kensington if ranked by percentage of the votes locally cast. == Members of Parliament ==