Johnson’s premiership confirms the trend: Scotland and England have never felt so far apart

Politics is a triage process these days in which foes are ranked according to the urgency of the threat they pose to your preferences and sensibilities. When push comes to shove, as it always does, the first law of politics is a simple one: identify the enemy. In much of England that means some voters with little love for Boris Johnson will still endorse Conservative candidates, for fear that failing to do so will hand Jeremy Corbyn the keys to Downing Street.

Matters are more complicated in Scotland. Here Tory insiders have no desire for an early election. Indeed they would much prefer the government to last, however improbable this may seem, until its term expires in 2022. They fear, with reason, that the gains made by the Tories in 2017 when the party went from holding one seat in Scotland to taking 13, will be jeopardised by a dash to the polls.

Some insiders fret, indeed, that the party might be reduced to just a handful of MPs if there’s an election this autumn or even next spring. Two years ago—and just as they had in the 2016 Holyrood elections, in which the party came second—the Tories won votes from many people who were not, as Ruth Davidson admitted herself, natural Tory voters. They were Unionist votes cast against the SNP just as much as they were a positive endorsement of Conservative candidates. The nationalists were the enemy and voters acted accordingly.

That will not be the case in any forthcoming election. This general election, if and when it happens—and it seems likely it must happen sooner rather than later—will be a Brexit poll. It is not difficult to find voters in Scotland who like Davidson but recoil from Johnson. Some will doubtless stick with the Tories on the grounds that the SNP remains the true foe. But many others, especially those who voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, are unlikely to endorse a party that, at a UK level, is intensely relaxed about the prospects of, at best, a harder Brexit than anything that was promised by the Leave campaign in 2016. Sixty-two per cent of Scots voted Remain and little that has happened since has persuaded them they were mistaken.

For all that Davidson has revived Scottish Toryism the plain fact of the matter is that the Tories remain a minority enthusiasm north of the border. That being so, Unionism needs a Labour government at Westminster from time to time and not just because a credible Labour Party is one way of tethering the Conservatives to their better instincts. In that respect Corbyn’s evident inadequacy, to say nothing of his personal political beliefs, makes him a threat to the Union’s credibility and longer-term future just as much as Johnson epitomises much that many Scots find most disagreeable about a particular strain of English Toryism.

Taken together Johnson and Corbyn suggest that the UK is no longer interested in being a serious country. That is a wearisome development for everyone but the difference is that Scotland plainly has options. For all that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP have not answered many of the questions that make independence a difficult project it remains a path that could be taken. The 2014 referendum put independence on the table and it has remained there ever since.

The United Kingdom’s long-term health was provisional, then, well before Brexit blew everything up. It would remain that even if Johnson were more popular in Scotland than he is. Perhaps he will surprise us all; he may have to. But as it is he is staggeringly unpopular. According to a YouGov poll last month, just 17 per cent of Scottish voters have a favourable view of Johnson. Seventy per cent disapprove of him and just six per cent think he will be a good or great prime minister. Even allowing for the fact these figures come from a small sample of the overall UK-wide poll they remain startling.

Johnson’s style, apparently so charming in parts of England, leaves most Scots unmoved, to put it mildly. It is not a question of policies—though a no-deal Brexit certainly does not help—but of personality. His presence in Downing Street gives some greater credence to one long-standing SNP argument: namely that Scotland and England share less than once they did and are, indeed, diverging rapidly. Their political cultures are less and less compatible.

If that’s the case, Johnson should be understood as the latest manifestation of an underlying trend rather than the cause of it. The various parts of the United Kingdom are increasingly estranged from each other and the ties that bind do so more loosely than once they did.

The immediate threat to the Union, however, is less the next UK general election than the 2021 elections to the Scottish parliament. At present it is an even money proposition as to whether the SNP (in alliance with the Greens) win an overall majority. If they do, a fresh poll on independence seems likely. For that to be avoided, Davidson will need to regain the support of voters who, no matter how much they dislike Johnson, dislike the SNP and independence even more. That election will be a proxy referendum on independence; the next UK general election will not, which is why it promises to be a bleak affair for the Conservative and Unionist party.