THIS EU referendum campaign has been like having a tooth extracted without anaesthetic by an unsympathetic dentist. It has alternated periods of pain with squirming squeamishness and all you can do is stare at the clock as you count down the minutes until it’s all over.

And you know that however the procedure turns out it’s going to cost you and will leave lasting wounds that will take forever to heal. The clock is counting down the final minutes, and soon it will all be over. Or at least this part of it.

I started off this campaign as an enthusiastic supporter of Remain. I lived in Europe for many years. The dug is an EU canine migrant into Scotland, entering this country on a Spanish EU pet passport.

I’m fluent in Spanish and genuinely believed in the European project. I naively hoped that someone in the official Remain campaign would try to make a positive case for a European project that was founded with the most noble of ideals, as an attempt to put the spectre of war behind Europe forever and to build a united continent where we are all more conscious of what we share than of what divides us. And by and large, despite its many faults and failures, the European project has succeeded in that. However, the campaign to stay in the EU has been so god-awful that I’ve come to believe they really do not deserve to win. Winning would only put a smug smile on the shiny face of a David Cameron who has conducted the entire proceedings as a campaign to save his sorry career. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

The official Remain campaign has been like a campaign for vegetarianism that’s only succeeded in persuading lifelong vegans to rush out to buy the latest Hannibal Lecter cookbook, Serving Suggestions for Conservative MPs. It’s shorter than his previous works as Tory MPs have no heart, brains, or backbone, just plenty of gall and that’s inedible.

I think to myself that if the Remain campaign has been so hapless, half-baked, and hopeless as to alienate someone like me, who started off with rock-solid European credentials, just what has it done to people who were unsure about it to begin with. It has been even worse than the Better Together campaign in its relentless negativity, its scaremongering, and its utter lack of any positive vision for remaining in Europe. There’s only one campaign that I can think of that’s even more lamentable, and that’s Leave.

It has matched Remain scare for scare, fearmongering for fearmongering, and has added a nasty dose of racism that has inflamed the British body politic like a strep infection. Much as it sticks in my throat like a Tory gall pie to see the Remain campaign win and Davie Cameron act like a victor, the victory of the Leave campaign would give that role to Boris Johnson, and that would be worse.

Not much worse, it has to be said, one smug Tory with a rampant sense of entitlement is much the same as another smug Tory with a rampant sense of entitlement. But it would still be worse, because it would strip us of our status as European citizens and put at risk our connections with the rest of the continent.

One of the Remain campaign’s many scare stories this week was that a Brexit would make the UK the most hated country in Europe, but the truth it is already as popular as George Osborne’s liver pate at a vegetarian buffet. That’s why we keep getting nul points in Eurovision.

No-one likes the UK enough to form a voting bloc with us, not even Ireland. The UK is already treading on thin ice as far as the tolerance and patience of other European nations is concerned. A Brexit wouldn’t just make the UK fall through the ice, the Tories would be taking a blow-torch to it in the hopes that they could sail off into the mid-Atlantic to seek a mythical special relationship with the USA.

Tomorrow I’ll be voting purely in Scotland’s interests. I’m going to vote in the way which has the best chance of producing a second independence referendum and wiping the smug grins off both sets of entitled Tories. I’m voting to Remain, not because I’m sold on the Remain campaign’s scare stories, threats, and menaces, but because only a Remain vote in Scotland combined with a Leave vote in the rest of the UK will produce the justification for a another independence referendum. There’s no guarantee that will happen of course, but in the event it doesn’t I’d rather suffer smug Tories while retaining my rights as a European citizen than suffering smug Tories without them.

In an ideal world, maybe somewhere in that infinity of parallel universes that some theories in physics tell us must exist, it is possible for both campaigns to lose simultaneously. If there’s an infinite number of universes then logically that must be possible. Although, that said, there still isn’t any universe anywhere in which Nigel Farage isn’t less irritating than a urinary tract infection. Both campaigns losing is certainly what they deserve, but sadly it’s not going to happen in this universe.

So I’m just going to hold out for my ideal result instead. It’s highly unlikely to come to pass, but what I really want is for the rest of the UK to vote narrowly to Leave, but Scotland to vote strongly to Remain, and then the UK as a whole will have to remain a member of the EU because Scotland said so.

That would really wipe the smug grins off all the Tories. The Brexiteers would have lost, and the Cameroons would have lost England. That’s the closest we can get to both sides losing. If you live in Scotland, vote Remain, and with a bit of luck we can make both Boris and Davie cry.