Going free to good home: Boris

WE all have our own way of coping in these fraught times. Reading, walking, gin, badminton, playing badminton while sloshed on gin: choose your own displacement activity. Me? I like to look at dog-rescue sites and fantasise about the perfect match out there just waiting to become a forever friend.

There was one candidate recently that seemed ideal, except for one thing. After a list of her many glowing attributes – loving, lively, likes a night on the sofa, desires world peace – was a warning: “So and so [her name wasn’t actually so and so but identities have to be changed to protect the guilty] can NOT live with cats.” Therein lay a tale no doubt.

Having heard Scotland’s Eddie Mair knocking seven bells out of Boris Johnson on the day of the Queen’s Speech, I feel it should be made clear from now on that the host of the BBC’s PM programme can NOT interview the Foreign Secretary. The carnage that ensues is simply too great.

Dundee’s finest, who cut his incisors at BBC Scotland, began by asking BoJo how Theresa May’s programme for government addressed the sort of burning injustices she promised to tackle on becoming PM. How, for example, would it stop the justice system treating black people more harshly than white?

A reasonable enough opener, something that should have been some advert somewhere. We must get to the bottom of this antipathy towards a figure who regularly tops UK polls asking who should be the next Prime Minister. Outwith Scotland, everybody loves Boris, his shaggy hairdo, his Have I Got News For You past as a joker, his genial harrumphing and colourful vocabulary. Like some escapee from a lesser known PG Wodehouse, is he not a veritable tonic, a caution in these insufferably stuffy politically correct times?

If I may speak on behalf of the man on the Dennistoun-bound omnibus: naw. Scotland has a particular beef with the Foreign Secretary, you see; so particular we even have our own word for it. BoJo gives us the pip because he comes across as a classic haverer, a steaming pile of piffle trying to pass himself off as a man of substance. And up with that sort of thing Scotland does not like to put.

But as I say, Scotland needs to reconsider. It is not just a reputation for friendliness we must protect. Given Boris’s determination to become prime minister, the chances are that he will indeed manage it one day and Scotland will have to do business with him.

I’d like to issue an appeal, therefore, for a good Scottish home to take in Boris for a while. Think of him as the human equivalent of a rescue dog, albeit one possessed of a hugely privileged start in life and a glossier coat. Anyone fancy it? Anyone?