DAVIE Mundell, Scotland’s political answer to Paddington Bear, the lone Conservative MP who pitched up on the doorstep of Westminster with a label saying “Will someone please take care of this stuffed toy Tory” attached to his duffel coat, has been making a pitch of his own this week. Davie’s intervention comes in the vain hope that Scotland’s voters might start taking him more seriously than a frayed sock puppet which has spent far too long on the unwashed feet of a Tory establishment treading the poor into the dirt.

The difference between Davie and a sock puppet is that the sock puppet does actually have a legitimate purpose as a sock, socks keep your feet warm. Davie, or ‘Fluffy’, and his pals cast the poor and vulnerable out into the cold. His supposed purpose is to be Scotland’s legitimate voice in the UK cabinet but really he’s the illegitimate UK cabinet’s voice in Scotland. And he uses money from the Scottish budget in order to promote policies rejected by over 85 per cent of Scotland’s voters. Then he complains that Scotland is a one party state. Fluffy thinks irony is something done by the person who launders his stuffed shirts.

A sock would make a better Secretary of State for Scotland than Fluffy Mundell. Socks have a firmer grasp of democratic accountability than Fluffy, and are considerably better value for money. Even the ones that you keep bursting through with your big toe because you have size 11 feet and when sock manufacturers say their socks will fit sizes 6 to 11 they’re lying. What they really mean is size 6 but they’ll stretch. Fluffy Mundell won’t stretch, he’s just burst. That’s how divisive the referendum was, Fluffy’s been rent in twain and his machinations left as naked as a big toe poking out the hole in his plausibility.

Unionists like to complain that the referendum has left Scotland divided. What they mean is that the referendum caused Scots to wake up and now people are not inclined to accept the word of sock puppets uncritically. The days when Scotland meekly accepted the self-serving managerialism of the likes of Fluffy and the empty goons of the Labour party in Scotland are over. What they call divisive, the rest of us call a healthy democracy, because where you have no political divisions, what you’ve got is a one party state. Yet here we are in a divisive one-party state, if you believe what you read in the Unionist press.

Having spent the last eight months clamping down more tightly on the promised new powers for Scotland than a constipated limpet with a Scrooge complex, Davie now wants us all to believe that he has seen the devolution light twinkling in the sky like the Star of Bethlehem. Follow Davie and he’ll lead us to our new-born devolution saviour, although not even the most fervent believer is going to confuse a Conservative government with the three wise men bearing gifts.

The problem for Davie’s credibility of course is that Scotland’s only Tory MP isn’t even one third of three Wise Men, and the only gold that’s being given is being handed over in bonuses to investment bankers. There are no new powers on offer, the respect agenda was dead and buried and won’t be rising again on the third day. All that the Fluffy one is giving to Scotland for Christmas are the traditional Tory gifts of goad, rank insult, and smirk.

There are no proposals for new powers for Scotland from a Conservative government that couldn’t even deliver the watered-down proposals of the Scotland Bill, which were watered down from the proposals of the Smith Commission, which were watered down from the proposals of the Vow. Instead, the Fluffmonkey is making a call for powers to be transferred from Holyrood, where Tories like him haven’t got a holey sock’s chance in a haberdasher’s of grasping it with their prehensile toes, to local authorities. This call is not unrelated to the fact that some local authorities have Tories forming part of the administration. You can however bet your cotton socks that if the SNP gain control of those local authorities in the local elections in 2017, Fluffy’s enthusiasm for local devolution will disappear faster than his boss’s respect agenda. The Tories destroyed local government when they were in power during the long dark years of the 80s and 90s. Thatcher and her Westminions hoarded power more jealously than a contestant on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here hogs the limelight. Apart from the devolved administrations and the London Assembly introduced by the following Labour government, the UK is still Europe’s most centralised country. The Tories continue to play lip service to local authority powers. It’s something that they say they’ll do when they’re in opposition, but as soon as they get power then all of a sudden the wee cooncils cannae be trusted.

In Scotland, Fluffy and the Tories have no power over local government as it’s a devolved matter, so all he’s doing is bleating a new SNPBaaaad complaint to add to the one party state mood music. It’s not about what’s good for Scotland, it’s about what’s good for the Unionist parties. It’s about the Tories and their hopes that by treading water they can become the second party in Scotland as Labour drowns in its own confusion and lack of purpose.

All the Tories in Scotland have to look forward to is that their decline into senile obsolescence is slower than the vertiginous plummet into carping obscurity suffered by the Labour Party. This means that there’s half a chance that Labour will fall past the Tories as both drop into the passed pages of Scottish political history. The Tories have got such low expectations of their own performance that they’re actually striving for this outcome like it would be some sort of great victory. They’ll continue to hog valuable Scottish resources that they have no moral right to, and they’ll continue to complain that Scotland is a one party state. But the party doing all the damage to Scottish democracy is the party that Fluffy Mundell represents.