How Boris landslide finally let him call SNP’s bluff

Joy cometh in the morning but ultimate satisfaction only follows stonking election victories. Boris Johnson’s letter to Nicola Sturgeon refusing her permission for a second referendum on Scexit was made possible only by last month’s landslide victory.

No more limping from vote to vote, no more bribing the DUP to get legislation over the line. Boris is Prime Minister in his own right and with the biggest mandate of any Conservative since Margaret Thatcher in 1987.

The trouncing of the Continuity Remain forces who previously held a majority in the Commons means Brexit is going ahead without delay and the Government can turn to hitherto unattended matters. one of the most important has been strengthening the United Kingdom, a personal mission for Boris since he has no desire to go down as the Prime Minister who lost the Union.

His letter to the SNP leader was first and foremost about stamping his authority. The Nationalists have been peddling the pernicious line that the UK Government lacks a mandate in Scotland.

In flatly ruling out the one governing priority the SNP has, Boris has made it clear what he makes of their fatuous claim.

Any prime minister based south of the Border was always going to be accused of bossing Scotland around for rejecting another Scexit referendum. one of the most sinister, and sinisterly effective, achievements of the SNP has been to elide the wishes and beliefs of Scottish nationalism with those of the Scottish nation.

It was this rhetorical trick that frightened David Cameron into granting the first referendum and allowing Alex Salmond to set the date and the franchise on which it was to be held. Boris’s letter has signalled that he is not afraid like Cameron was.

Aware that being posh and English puts him at a disadvantage in any clash with Sturgeon, the Prime Minister carefully constructed his response to her Section 30 request as a defence, rather than a dismissal, of Scotland’s democratic will. His logic was Sturgeon and Salmond had given ‘a personal promise’ that the 2014 plebiscite would be a ‘once in a generation’ affair.

The electorate, he reminded her, ‘voted decisively on that promise to keep our United Kingdom together’ and both governments had affirmed their commitment to respecting the result in the preceding Edinburgh Agreement.

The Nationalists style themselves as defenders of Scottish democracy. Boris is saying it is time they stood by one of the biggest-ever exercises in just that: more than two million Scots voting to remain in the UK. The Tory leader has proved his commitment to the Union and sent a message to Sturgeon far blunter than the politely worded missive that plopped onto her desk yesterday: I am the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and I speak for

Scotland at least as much as you do. The letter must be seen in the context of comments over the weekend by Secretary of State Alister Jack, who said an SNP majority after the next Holyrood election was not sufficient to trigger a second referendum.

IF this is now Downing Street’s position – and if it remains so – Boris has chosen strength and leadership over the appeasement of the Cameron years. If he also refuses any further devolution to the Scottish parliament, he will not just be Minister for the Union, he will be Hero of the Union.

The Prime Minister shares credit for this new, unapologetically Unionist stance with two colleagues. Michael Gove, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is understood to have been the architect of this strategy and kept it on the Government’s agenda when Brexit threatened to consume all around it.

The other is Theresa May, the first Tory prime minister of the devolution era to say No to the Nationalists when she rejected Sturgeon’s early 2017 demand for another referendum.

The most powerful section of Johnson’s letter was not actually about the rights and wrongs of Scexit but the damage Sturgeon has done to public services in her independence-driven neglect. He noted: ‘Another independence referendum would continue the political stagnation that Scotland has seen for the last decade, with Scottish schools, hospitals and jobs again left behind because of a campaign to separate the UK. It is time we all worked to bring the whole of the United Kingdom together and unleash the potential of this great country.’

This was an old Etonian’s gentlemanly way of reminding the First Minister of her job and telling her to get bloody on with it.

In response, Sturgeon declared the Tories ‘terrified’ of the judgment of the Scottish people. It is true that, were a referendum held tomorrow, the UK Government would not be as confident of victory as it was in 2014. But the Tories are not really terrified – they have the power, after all.

The person who is truly terrified is Nicola Sturgeon. She is not terrified of Boris, for she has her own fiefdom in which he is mostly irrelevant. She is not terrified of any of the contenders for Labour leader, none of whom is up to reviving Scottish Labour. She is not even terrified of the electorate because, as December 12 showed, she still commands enough support to win elections handsomely.

What terrifies her are the people behind her – her MPs and MSPs, grassroots activists and party members. For the past five years she has whipped them into a frenzy, saying another referendum lay around the next corner. Boris has brought the corner to them and shown it to be empty.

Sturgeon says that the Prime Minister’s position ‘will not stand’ – but it is hers that is looking less and less secure.