Unthinkable price we could pay for Boris’s shambolic self-destruction

AT the beginning of 2021 I said on this page that engaging in politics in Scotland is a lot like being a wildebeest stuck in a quagmire.

I mentioned we had been in stasis for some 14 years. Make that almost 15. And I fantasised, as hopelessly marooned souls do, of rescue.

This was in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s inauguration following four fetid years of Donald Trump. It felt like gazing across the plain to another muddy mess from which a fellow member of the herd had just been plucked to safety.

If it can happen there, why not here?

The past year has brought both added insight to our predicament and a reality check on the rosy future I imagined for the rescued wildebeest. Most noticeably, these last 12 months have sunk us several inches deeper in the glop.

Blundering

The indignation now felt in every part of England over the latest crisis to engulf Boris Johnson’s premiership is entirely justified. The Prime Minister’s unerring ability to confirm people’s worst suspicions about him – that he is entitled, self-serving, hypocritical, blundering – is staggering in an administration which does not need to look beyond its own party for foes.

But in Scotland, particularly among voters who wish to protect the Union as I do, the anger is off the scale.

I recall the words of Geoffrey Howe who, on resigning from Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, likened her to a cricket captain who broke her team’s bats before sending them out to the crease to receive. That damning analogy may well have ended her time in office.

Three decades on, it is hard to think of a more apposite analogy for what Boris Johnson is doing right now to Scottish members of his own team, gamely defending the Union with an artillery he persists in weakening.

The frustration of Baroness Davidson, the former Scottish Tory leader, is palpable. ‘None of this is remotely defensible,’ she says of last year’s rulebreaking Downing Street party, of which the Prime Minister denied all knowledge.

Included in her list of indefensible factors in this affair are ‘flat-out denying things that are easily provable’ and ‘taking the public for fools’.

The current Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, says his boss should resign if he is found to have misled parliament over the illicit No10 soirée.

The PM obviously should. It is enshrined in the code of conduct that ministers guilty of such a breach do so. But the fact he is saying it at all, unequivocally and at some length, is instructive. He is utterly furious and is right to be.

So much for the politicians. They came into this game with their eyes open. They were under no illusions about the propensity of friends and foes alike to make life harder for them in what is, after all, a never-ending scramble for power.

But they are not the stricken wildebeest casting around the barren landscape for some glimpse of salvation. No, that is us stuck there – and, crazy as it may seem in weeks like this one, it is to politicians that we look for rescue.

The Nationalist solution to our plight is so well-rehearsed it hardly needs stating. Forget those blithering Westminster idiots and reach out to us. We will haul you out of the mire. Just sign the pledge to renounce Britain, the place you think you are from, that central plank of your very identity, and we’ll have you back on your feet in no time.

Mirage

And therein lies the fiery core of Scottish Unionist rage. We know very well the land of milk and honey promised by our Nationalist charmers is but a mirage – an apparition conjured through delirium which bears no relation to the facts of SNP government failure in the departments that matter most: health, education, the economy.

Yet the Prime Minister to whom we look to underline the benefits of resisting Nationalist advances, of being part of a bigger, more functional democracy, appears incapable of establishing competency.

Mr Johnson’s second child with his wife Carrie – his seventh (at least) in total – was born yesterday. News cycles being what they are, these happy tidings will no doubt draw heat away from the Downing Street party scandal which threatened to topple him.

But the fundamental problem is not going away. Even before this latest unedifying chapter in his tenure the PM’s approval ratings were the lowest on record.

According to the latest poll by Ipsos MORI, 80 per cent of Scots are dissatisfied with the way he is doing his job. And this for a leader whose party still carries the word Unionist in its name.

I sympathise with English voters, then, who fear that their man may be proving a disappointment. But north of the Border there is far more at stake than the risk of the reins of government being temporarily taken by the opposition party.

Here the risk is of permanent loss, an irreversible change which those of us who value our Britishness would forever regret.

The SNP’s record in government is hardly scintillating. Their own gaffes are legion. Their blusterer in chief at Westminster is an investment banker masquerading as a humble Skye crofter.

Is it really beyond the wit of a team chosen from a far wider talent pool to show the maturity, vision and sure-footedness to put them in their place?

At the very least, Boris must summon the common sense to stop making their argument for them.