Stephen Daisley

The prospect of a Christmas election is one the Scottish Conservatives do not greet with enthusiasm. The party has lost its leader, must fight a Brexit election in a country that voted 62 per cent Remain, and faces an SNP riding high in the polls. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the party is flattened by another 1997-style wipeout. After that election, it took the Tories 20 years to recover their standing north of the border. Another trip to the ballot box will be a retention operation: how many of their 13 seats can the Scottish Tories hold onto? The SNP could not ask for a better set of circumstances in which to fight an election.

Rumours of the Prime Minister’s death in a ditch have been greatly exaggerated. Parliament’s rejection of the Government’s programme motion for its withdrawal agreement bill makes it all but impossible for Boris Johnson to extricate the UK from the EU by 31 October as promised. It is an obvious defeat for a PM who got the job by swearing to Tory members that he would have us out by Halloween, no tricks, no treats, no last-minute scares. It is also, however, probably the optimal way for Johnson to break his oath. To the uninvested voter with only a passing interest in the goings-on at Westminster, tonight was not about the PM’s new withdrawal agreement or the programme motion or which Labour MPs trotted through the Aye lobby.

Some things just don’t pass the gut test. Your head tells you they’re right, all the facts point in their favour, but you can’t suppress a dyspeptic rumbling. The jailing of Catalan separatist leaders should give us all political indigestion. On Monday, Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced 12 activists and key figures from the autonomous government and parliament of Catalonia, all of whom helped organise an illegal referendum in October 2017 to secure independence for the Spanish region. Nine defendants, including former ministers and the parliamentary speaker, were jailed for up to 13 years for offences including sedition and misuse of public funds. Three others were fined for lesser offences.

What if they succeed in thwarting Brexit? The odds seem weighted against Boris Johnson delivering his do-or-die (-in-a-ditch) promise to get the UK out of the EU by Halloween. The Benn Act has tied the government’s hands so there is no need for Brussels to budge. Donald Tusk can wait until Johnson cracks and complies, or until the Remain Parliament ousts him and installs a prime minister who will hold a second referendum or revoke Article 50 altogether.  Because MPs have no commonly agreed position, we can’t be sure which eventuality we’re heading for, but we can agree that Britain’s membership continuing on November 1 would represent a big defeat for the Prime Minister, his government and the Brexit movement.

We told them so, didn’t we? We said it was a terrible idea and would all end in tears. We pointed out that the UK doesn’t send £350 million a week to Brussels, that Turkey was not about to join the EU, and that Britain held the weaker hand and couldn’t dictate the terms of any new relationship. Now, 30 days out from our supposed departure date, Remainers find ourselves in the strongest position yet to thwart Brexit. Parliament has been unprorogued, the government’s hands have been tied, its majority obliterated, and opposition parties have learned to work together (more or less) to frustrate ministers.

One of the downsides of all this snarking at David Cameron over Brexit is that the rest of his legacy is getting away relatively snark-free. Fraser Nelson has resumed his valiant campaign to repackage the Cameron years as a well-spring of progressive Toryism, specifically in job creation, the expansion of academies, and shifting the tax burden. This effort has always struck me as iffy. For one thing, shouldn’t conservatives want the credit for economic dynamism, school choice and tax cuts to go to conservatism, rather than concede them as ‘progressive’ outcomes which conservatives have achieved in spite of their unfortunate philosophy? But Fraser isn’t really a conservative.

Happy Union Day, the fifth anniversary of Scotland’s vote to remain in the United Kingdom. It’s gotten so commercial, though at least voting No to independence means the Scots still have a currency to buy their celebratory Union Jack bunting in. Only there’s not much in the way of celebrations today. In 2014, the Better Together campaign made a big deal of an independent Scotland starting life outside the EU. Unionists don’t bring that up anymore.  Opponents of nationalism have lost their figurehead in Ruth Davidson and as well as Brexit they have been lumped with Boris Johnson, a man who polls in Scotland like veganism in Alabama.

For something that has yet to and may never happen, Brexit has reordered the fundamentals of British politics in just three years. The Tories have shifted decisively from post-Thatcher ambivalence about their role as upholders of the prevailing order to a right-wing radicalism that views Parliament, the legal establishment, and captains of industry as threats to, rather than pillars of, British freedom. Electoral reformers who once downplayed the time-honoured link between constituent and parliamentarian now laud MPs who spurn a national result in deference to local opinion. Cultural identity has replaced austerity as the motor of progressive antagonism towards the Tories, who in turn have lost all interest in fiscal prudence and economic growth.

John Bercow’s decision not to stand for re-election will bring some satisfaction to Brexiteers after several miserable weeks. The Speaker has been nakedly partisan, personally spiteful in the chair and done more to resist Brexit than the entire Labour Party put together. Many Tories consider him a jumped-up little twerp with an over-inflated sense of his constitutional significance but he is their jumped-up little twerp, one who entered Parliament by pandering to hard-right prejudices and whom backbench Tories rallied behind in 2015 when the Coalition government tried to get rid of him. Then Leader of the House William Hague concocted a plot to oust Bercow by introducing a secret ballot for electing a Speaker in the next Parliament.

In 2014, a young SNP activist called Aidan Kerr caused some consternation when he contended that Scotland was undergoing ‘Ulsterisation’. The nation’s politics, which for the past generation had pitched nationalism against social democracy, was becoming a battle between nationalism and unionism. The casus belli would be identity, not class or income. Kerr’s critics were soon silenced as his predictions began to pan out. The Scottish Tories replaced Labour as the main opposition on a single-issue pro-Union platform. Labour politicians who had avoided the term ‘Unionist’ because of its association with cultural Protestantism embraced the label, if often with evident discomfort.

Ruth Davidson is set to quit as Scottish Conservative leader. A party source is quoted in the Scottish Sun saying Davidson’s departure will be as a result of the ‘huge pressure’ of new motherhood — she gave birth to a son, Finn, last October — and finding herself ‘at increasing odds with the new leadership in London’. What can we take from this? Twinning her objections to no-deal Brexit with the toll of mothering while in a high-pressured job dilutes her resignation as a protest against the course Number 10 has chosen today. And Davidson has been in politics (and before that journalism) long enough to know that.

Gordon Brown has broken his silence again. The former prime minister told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the Scottish Parliament had ‘failed to deliver a fairer and more prosperous Scotland’ and had instead become a ‘battering ram for constitutional warfare’. What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s trapped down the well? And creating a Scottish parliament to run almost all of Scotland’s affairs separately from the rest of the UK helped rather than hurt the campaign for independence? Jeepers. The battering ram that Brown laments exists only because the party and government in which he played a somewhat senior role insisted on fashioning it.