Can the Union survive Boris?
The Prime Minister embodies every SNP slur against Westminster and Britain.
Image by UK Government via Creative Commons 2.0
If anything captured what an extraordinary week this has been, it was the words of Tory MSP Craig Hoy.
Appearing on Good Morning Scotland on Friday, the South Scotland parliamentarian assured his interviewer: ‘There’s absolute unanimity that we believe in Scotland remaining in the UK.’
Since the independence referendum the Scottish Tories have invested much of their energies in painting themselves as the party of the Union. That an MSP felt the need to restate this is an indication of the damage wrought in the past few days.
Hoy also insisted the UK and Scottish Tories were ‘not two parties’ and were united on fighting the SNP and holding Nicola Sturgeon’s government to account. Again, not something anyone felt the need to spell out before this week.
Douglas Ross’s decision to call for the Prime Minister’s resignation over the Partygate scandal was a principled action. However, it has put the Scottish Conservative leader at odds with the upper echelons of his party in a fashion that, although admirable even to his opponents, could end up costing him more than any benefit it might confer.
Already his stance, prompted by Boris Johnson’s admission that he was present at a party during lockdown, has brought Ross the opprobrium of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who says the Scottish Tory leader is a ‘lightweight’ and ‘not a big figure in the Conservative Party’. While Conservative MSPs have mostly fallen in line behind their Holyrood leader, some grassroots activists grumble privately — and not so privately — that Ross should focus his fire on Nicola Sturgeon rather than a Tory prime minister.
It would have been easy enough to be a good party man and bite his tongue. Political rivals would have made mischief out of his silence but he would hardly be the first politician to keep quiet about the behaviour of a party leader in order to advance their own career.
That option was not open to Ross for the simple reason that he sincerely believes the Prime Minister should resign. His determination was not reached solely through political calculation, though it would be naive to assume that played no role, but because he considers it insupportable that a prime minister can break the rules he imposes on the country. Whatever it might end up costing him, Ross’s decision was predominantly one of principle.
That is not to say there is no advantage to be mined from it. Ross’s withdrawal of confidence has put distance between him and a deeply unpopular figure in Scotland, a gap that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attacks have flooded with a reservoir’s worth of clear blue water. The SNP can call Ross many things but they can no longer call him Boris Johnson’s man in Scotland.
Electorally, that brings opportunities and challenges. Scottish voters like gumption and Ross has certainly shown that. They don’t like Boris and, for some, an anti-Boris Toryism might be an appealing proposition. However, it is just as true that the electorate tends to shy away from divided parties. Nicola Sturgeon will do her best to push division — it is, after all, what she does best — and a protracted period of the UK and Scottish Tory leaders being sworn enemies would certainly play into her hands. Just as she has made seven years of hay out of the old line about Scottish Labour being a ‘branch office’, she will do the same out of Rees-Mogg’s belittling of the Scottish Tory leader.
The Prime Minister has already admitted attending a social gathering during lockdown, one of several such parties held by Number 10 or other departments, all of them seemingly in the face of Covid-19 restrictions. Downing Street staff have even been alleged to have held a party the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, during which memorial service the Queen was forced to sit alone for social distancing reasons. It is difficult to think of a scenario that could more thoroughly appall traditional Tory voters, to say nothing of the country at large.
Sue Gray’s inquiry is ongoing but reports suggest it will point the finger at a ‘drinking culture’ in government rather than assign blame to any individual minister or civil servant. Given the political stakes, anything short of a fulsome indictment of the Prime Minister is bound to be branded a whitewash.
What happens next could play out in one of several ways. The Prime Minister might decide he cannot go on or that he no longer wants to. The powers and privileges of the job are very attractive but among the downsides to being First Lord of the Treasury is that it wrecks your family life and pays a modest salary compared to what Johnson could earn in the private sector. Resignation would allow Boris to enjoy the early years of his two infant children and it would make him eligible once more for extravagantly-paid gigs like his old perch at the Telegraph and the sort of speaking and consulting opportunities that have made Tony Blair a very wealthy man.
Alternatively, the famed Men in Grey Suits might come shuffling in — and shuffle him out. Even Margaret Thatcher could not fend off these most fearsome of political assassins. If Conservative MPs determine that he cannot win another election, that the constant stream of revelations is just too damning, Johnson could find himself subject to a leadership challenge. His chances in such a ballot are uncertain. He has made so many enemies on the way up, there would be a ready-made electorate of Tory MPs champing at the bit to bring him back down. On the other hand, it is not clear who the party would replace him with.
More polling will have to be done into how voters feel about a post-Boris Tory party, which figurehead they would prefer and what direction they would like to see the country head in. Although it might seem obvious that removing Johnson would make the party more popular, there is no guarantee. The public might be scunnered not only with the captain but with the whole team. The bottom line: leaving Boris in situ is a major risk; removing him is a risk of indeterminate magnitude.
What if he stays put? It might sound improbable — ludicrous, even — but there is a path to the Prime Minister remaining in Number 10, albeit a perilous route. He could abandon the moderation of his government so far, and the liberal principles he hews to more faithfully than anything resembling conservatism, and adopt a ruthless Vote Leave strategy.
This would involve an unholy trinity of cynical politicking. First, he would shower the Red Wall with cash in lieu of his promise to 'level up', which has so far come to naught. Next, he would ramp up the flag-waving rhetoric about buoyant Brexit Britain and how the only threat was a Remainer elite preparing to undo the referendum result by installing Sir Keir Starmer in Number 10. Finally, he would lean heavily into matters such as immigration, asylum and crime while putting a few carefully chosen culture war issues into play.
The object would not be to beat Sir Keir in a fair fight, for the Labour leader is disciplined enough to know not to rise to any bait laid by Boris Johnson. The object, instead, would be to goad those around Sir Keir, on his front and back benches, into responding and thus shifting the debate onto Tory territory, or over-reaching and making Labour appear extreme and Boris the voice of reason. There is a lot of anger out there and a calculating populist like Johnson would have no qualms about tapping into it.
In these circumstances, and especially if the Prime Minister was re-elected when the country next goes to the polls, Douglas Ross's position would be fatally undermined, as would the ethical argument he has sought to make. The public's fresh embrace of Boris would be interpreted as a cold shoulder for Ross and for the contention that prime ministers must be accountable for wrongdoing on their watch. It would be all but impossible for Ross to continue in post after everything that has been said. If nothing else, it would be untenable to go into the next election with both Johnson and Ross in their current roles. For one to stay, the other must go.
Ultimately, however, the import of the current moment lies not in what becomes of Douglas Ross or Boris Johnson, but in what becomes of the Union. Jacob Rees-Mogg is not behaving like a Unionist. He is a Boris loyalist seemingly prepared to destroy the village in order to save his prime minister. However, the Tories have always been bigger than one man or woman. For most of the party’s existence, its raison d’etre has been to stem the tide of socialism in Britain, and for much of that time to provide a bulwark against nationalism, too.
It is, after all, the Conservative and Unionist Party, and although the Union referenced in this extended name is the former one with Ireland, rather than the one between Scotland and England, no Tory with real understanding of the constitutional position north of the border is in any doubt about how precious the modern Union is. Without Scotland the Tories would be, in effect, the English National Party.
Already some are attempting to revive the proposal, once touted by Murdo Fraser, of dissolving the Scottish Conservatives and replacing it with a new centre-right party constitutionally independent of but politically allied to the UK Tories. They say this marks a natural point of departure, giving Ross the chance to build on his opposition to Johnson and attract a raft of new voters to a fresh political banner.
The conviction that the way forward for the Scottish centre-right is splitting from the British centre-right is one shot-through with danger. Conceding that a Britain-wide Tory party is not viable begs the question: if the Union cannot sustain a single right-of-centre political party, is the Union itself politically sustainable? Nicola Sturgeon for one would enjoy taunting this new outfit that it believed in independence for itself but not for Scotland.
The idea of a new party is a non-starter. Not only does it draw on the grievance-laden logic of separatism, it is fundamentally unconservative. Tearing down even flawed institutions and starting from scratch, impelled along by the irresistible draw of the shiny and new, is not the action of a conservative but of a frustrated idealist. A conservative guards institutions, reforming them if need be, and never supposes that any one person is bigger than the institution to which he belongs. A conservative would replace the leader, not the institution he leads.
If Douglas Ross’s stand against Boris is indeed as signal a moment as advocates of a breakaway party say, it should allow the Scottish Tory leader to take another course. One in which the Holyrood-based party remains structurally part of the UK Tories but which feels more confident about expressing its own identity and inflections. Not seeking out fights with Westminster but showing a little more assertiveness on matters where a different line is required in Scotland than in the Home Counties. Westminster’s removal of the Universal Credit uplift was opposed by the Scottish Tories, though you would be hard-pressed to find many voters aware of that fact.
Douglas Ross took a stand this week and it may prove to be the right one. That does not alter the fact that a running dispute between Number 10 and the Scottish leader’s office is too great a gift to hand Nicola Sturgeon. Already she has proclaimed that Rees-Mogg’s comments are ‘not just personal insults directed at the leader of the Scottish Conservatives but say something much deeper about the Westminster establishment’s utter contempt for Scotland’. As such, she told Holyrood on Thursday, ‘an added benefit of being independent is that we will no longer have to put up with being treated like something on the sole of Westminster’s shoe’.
That kind of incendiary rhetoric is deplorable and confirms just how low Sturgeon will go to stir up hatred of Westminster provided it advances her cause. But she is only able to do so because Downing Street has given her the ammunition. Her artillery is replenished every day that Boris Johnson remains Prime Minister. This is not the primary reason why he should resign or be removed but it comes a close second. (It is also why the next prime minister should make finding a new Leader of the House a top priority.)
If Johnson stays, and if as a consequence Douglas Ross were to go, the constitutional harm done could well be incalculable. The image of a Scottish Tory leader felled for standing up to wrongdoing in Downing Street would not only reek of injustice, it would be potentially toxic for the Union. Westminster will-to-power would have won out over fairness, natural justice and quite possibly the rule of law. Even in its darkest imaginings, the SNP could not conjure up a starker symbol of what they deem a corrupt, immoral Union.
Douglas Ross has therefore taken the biggest gamble of his political life but one with implications far beyond his personal ambitions. He has drawn a line on a matter of principle against his own Prime Minister and will pay for it with his career if his Prime Minister wins the day. The Union will pay, too.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 15, 2022.
You mention the ammunition of Sturgeon against Johnson ,what of the wasted ammunition of Ross if there was an award for missing the target he would have won ages ago ,Ruth Davidson was great at hammering Sturgeon Ross has never come close ,maybe he should resign not his boss !
Ross is a policeman at heart; Boris a politician to his untidy hair-ends.
One is talking of law and order, quite correctly so; the other is, or should be, talking about the rule of law.
They are not the same thing, and the latter is even more important than the former.
What ties Scotland and England together is a shared ideal of establishing the rule of law, first at home and, hopefully, internationally.
The real, underlying reason for the Union is to defend the RULE OF LAW. That was what we have been doing together since 1707. It was the irreducible essence of our struggle against Louis XIV, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Napoleon, the landed franchise pre-1832, the Kaiser, Hitler, Comrade Scargill et al and the Kremlin from Lenin to Putin. It is, or should be, why we are bracing ourselves for defence against President Xi and his capitalistic totalitarian imperialists and their fellow travellers in the EU.
I have written a book about this, citing Scotland as a specific case, but with a view to a wider application internationally. It is called "THE JUSTICE FACTORY: Can the Rule of Law Survive in 21st Century Scotland?" (Ian Mitchell, 2020)
It is not a party-political screed. It has been endorsed by both ends of the political spectrum here: Ian ("Stone of Destiny") Hamilton QC, the renegade nationalist, and Adam Tomkins, who is both an ex-MSP (Tory) and Professor of Constitutional Law in the University of Glasgow. The Foreword is written by Lord Hope of Craighead, ex-Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court and Alan Page, Professor of Public Law at Dundee, who is the author “Constitutional Law of Scotland”, the main reference work, has written an Introduction to Part II. Details of the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1981993401?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860