Douglas Ross is right: Boris Johnson must go

In May 2020 Douglas Ross resigned from Boris Johnson’s government. Though only a junior minister in the Scotland Office – Ross was not at that time a member of the Holyrood parliament or leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party – Ross was still the most senior figure to resign in protest at how the government handled the Dominic Cummings affair. Ross was clear: Cummings had plainly broken the government’s own Covid rules and, this being so, decency demanded he clear his desk. No-one, not even the great Cummings, could be thought indispensable.

As it happens, the Cummings story broke just a couple of days after the Prime Minister and his then fiancee attended a BYOB post-work piss-up in Downing Street. Boris Johnson may have inadvertently or ‘implicitly’ considered this a ‘work event’ – though such soirées would seem to fall foul of the government’s guidelines too – but to everyone else, including Douglas Ross, it was plainly what it was advertised to be: a party.