Brexit and why SNP will pay price for their EU fudge

THERESA MAY, not for the first time, has shown the nerve that eluded two vacillating predecessors, James Callaghan and Gordon Brown.

Both ducked opportunities to call a snap election – and duly rued it. She has seized it. The outcome is not in serious doubt.

And it is likely to end in high embarrassment for the SNP, likely that Nicola Sturgeon’s sustained misjudgments over the year past will, within weeks and in the pitiless privacy of the ballot box, be exposed.

Nor will she be alone. Take Angus Robertson, MP for Moray and leader of Nationalists at Westminster. His has never been that safe a seat. On first outing, in 2001, he nearly lost it. Two years ago, despite the SNP surge, he still failed to make 50 per cent of the poll. In June, the people of Moray came within a sneeze of voting for Brexit. Remain carried the county by just 122 votes.

This has not, weirdly, deterred Robertson in the slightest from banging tearfully on in the Commons about the enormity of being wrested from the European Union, the lone voice of righteousness poised to lead his nation back to its sunlit uplands. And hard electoral peril lies ahead. The General Election of May 2015 fell in circumstances extraordinarily propitious for the SNP. The Nationalists were on a roll after the excitement of the independence referendum, with greatly fatted membership and a fresh new face at the top.

There was no coherent opposition to the Nationalist surge. Besides, independence was not an issue. Sturgeon made clear there would be no revival of the matter supposing her party won every Westminster seat in the country… as, on the day, it almost did.

Only three Scottish seats eluded the tide of SNP yellow, and two by majorities of less than 1,000. Just part of Miss Sturgeon’s big fat headache yesterday was that the bar was thus set extraordinarily high.

Anything short of the 2015 triumph will be seen (and felt) as a reverse. And the Tories will scarcely shun the opportunity to suggest the tide has turned against the SNP and for the Union, that there is no popular appetite for another independence poll.

SNP reverse, to some degree, looks inevitable. Even in the Scottish parliament contest, a year ago, several Nationalist incumbents unexpectedly lost their seats.

The averred Liberal Democrat pariahs snatched two of them. Labour unexpectedly held on in such improbable quarters as Helensburgh, Morningside and North Berwick.

But the Scottish Tories – under gutsy new leadership of one who offered Ruth, the whole Ruth and nothing but the Ruth – burst sensationally through as a new and coherent force of opposition, winning all sorts of seats and, garnering supporters of the Union from all over the place, eclipsing the broken Scottish Labour Party.

There were other straws in the wind. The energy that marked the SNP triumph in 2015 was absent. Few of the tens of thousands of new members were evident in the street campaigning.

Worse, the feared Activate – a mighty Nationalist electoral database – crashed for critical hours on polling day. And there was a cult-like feeling at big SNP events – notably the manifesto launch, where journalists were deliberately humiliated, booed by yowling activists for the temerity of asking a question of the smirking First Minister.

Her biggest miscalculation was to set the door ajar, yet again, for another independence referendum in the SNP manifesto, ‘if there is a material change in circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will’.

At the time Sturgeon and her coterie of flatterers sat down to pen these words, it is most unlikely they expected such a turn of events. No one, this time last year, seriously expected Britain to vote for Brexit, and in the tight, sad little bubble in which Sturgeon lives – politically correct, secular, metrosexual and ‘progressive’ – it is unlikely she personally knows anyone who did.

But, come the dread hour by dawn of June 24, Sturgeon made an elementary political mistake – summoning the media at oh-gosh o’clock to announce she had immediately instructed her civil servants to draft plans for a second independence plebiscite, not two years after the last one. Nothing suggests shaky political judgment more than unseemly haste and little was more calculated to incense untold ordinary Scots than the re-run of a vote which had ended with an emphatic vote for the Union.

Sturgeon herself, no less, declared in the 2014 campaign it was a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity. Words like ‘lifetime’ and ‘generation’ have elastic meaning in politics.

Eighteen years passed between our two plebiscites on devolution and a pause of that order would be reasonable enough. But two polls, on a matter so dramatic and existential, within a handful of years?

FOR the first time, the First Minister looked precipitate, flaky. For the first time, we were forcefully reminded that she is a prisoner of the carnivorous mass of SNP activists. And, as the months have unfolded, it grew evident she had not really studied the Brexit vote or thought through its implications.

More Scots voted to leave the EU last June than voted for the SNP last May, and 30 per cent of those backing Leave are SNP voters – in the cool logic that it makes no sense to cast off the averred yoke of London only to wilt under the sovereignty of Brussels.

Only this year has the Scottish Government belatedly acknowledged a widespread lack of Scottish enthusiasm for the EU – even as Sturgeon moved grandly to secure a Scottish parliament vote for another referendum, on the assertion that such is indeed the ‘will of the Scottish people’.

We need to hear rather less about our averred will and rather more about what Sturgeon really believes. Will she campaign for the independence on terms of full EU membership? What, then, of the 300,000 Yes voters who, last June, backed Leave? What of the currency? What of the Border, our trading terms with the country that buys 80 per cent of Scotland’s goods and services?

Not since October 1974 will a General Election have been so dominated by independence. Yet the issue is inextricably entwined with Brexit, and a second-rate politician’s blithe assumption that her oozing Europhilia is shared by the mass of ordinary Scots.

We – and Sturgeon – will learn indeed what the will of the people is on June 8. The stuff that dreams are made of. Bad dreams.