Boris Johnson’s Scotland problem

A few months ago, Tory aides spotted a suspicious pattern. If they agreed on a new Covid policy to be announced in a week, Keir Starmer would get wind of it and demand it was implemented immediately. In No. 10, two conclusions were drawn: that they had a mole (perhaps on Sage) and that the Labour party’s policy was to try to look prescient. The conclusion? Ignore it. In such times, they reasoned, no one cares about Westminster games. But it’s a different matter when it comes to being upstaged by Nicola Sturgeon.

To many Tories, she is the real opposition leader these days. If Boris Johnson’s premiership collapses — despite delivering Brexit and even if he sees off Covid — it will likely be due to her. Until the pandemic, opinion polls showed little change in appetite for Scottish independence. But since then, support for separation has surged. It’s not that the Scottish government has managed the crisis well — an Imperial College study found that Scotland along with England had among the highest rates of death from all causes in the first wave of the pandemic — but politically, Sturgeon’s handling has been deft. She has not established a Boris-esque pattern of making promises that are later abandoned.

So when she called for a national lockdown this week, few were surprised that Johnson did the same within hours. As a general rule in this pandemic, when Sturgeon takes an action, it’s not too long before Johnson follows. She even hinted at this herself, telling MSPs that while she wouldn’t dare to predict what the Prime Minister would say in his address on Monday evening, she suspected it would ‘not be dissimilar to here’. She has developed a reputation for being consistent while Johnson has one for being on the backfoot.