Will Boris Johnson take responsibility for the Union?

Even for a virtual party conference, Boris Johnson’s speech to the Scottish Tories was a muted affair. As might be expected, the Prime Minister talked up the strength of the Union as demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Almost 2 million Scots had received a jab thanks to the 400 million vaccine doses secured by the Treasury’s deep pockets — proof, he said, of ‘the United Kingdom’s collective strength’. He took time to praise UK Armed Forces personnel, 500-strong at present, who are spread across 80 Army-established vaccination centres throughout Scotland. This of course was a reminder that the British Army had been there to pick up the slack when the Scottish Government failed to meet its first big vaccination target at the end of January.

Crediting the country for pulling together in the face of the pandemic, it showed, he contended, ‘that the great British spirit that saw us through so much adversary in the past, lives on in us today’.