Henry Hill

Scottish Tories should not bin Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson visits Peterhead in Scotland in 2019 (photo: Getty)

Ideas, as a fictitious terrorist once said, are bulletproof. This might be stretching the truth a little, but at the very least they are not easily slain. So long as they appeal to someone’s sentiments or self-interest, no amount of logical dismemberment is enough to put them down for good.

The zombie stalking the discourse today is the suggestion that the Scottish Conservatives should split away from the national party. This zombie has grown no less horrible since Tory members put it in the ground by electing Ruth Davidson ten years ago. So, let’s break out the gasoline and the matches and see if we can’t see it off for good this time.

Boris Johnson has never been popular with the Scottish Conservatives. They perceive him, rightly, as a drag on the party’s vote. Nor have they the same grounds as their comrades in England and Wales to thank him for the 2019 election result, which saw them lose half their hard-won gains from two years before (even if this owed more to Labour’s collapse than anything).

A section of the Scottish party is committed to the idea of a split. No matter that when the idea was put to the members in 2011 by Murdo Fraser, it was decisively rejected. They believe an independent centre-right party would outperform the Tory vote.

They may be right, at least in the short-term. One need only look across the Irish Sea at the hegemonic position until recently enjoyed by the Democratic Unionists to see the dividends that pork-and-bunting unionism, unmoored from national commitments, can deliver. Such a richness of seats, salaries, and other spoils is enough to turn otherwise-level heads.

Has the treatment of NI over the past few years been an advert for alienating a part of the UK from the national politics of the UK?

But in the longer term, a split would turn the Conservatives from a vital pillar of the Union into yet another force slowly eating away at its foundations.

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