THE first sign of a descent into madness is when you start to believe your own hype. It’s only a couple of weeks since the Unionist parties yet again lost the Scottish elections, and lost them badly, but to hear them go on you’d think that when Scotland spoke on May 5 what the country said was that politically it had transformed itself into Essex during a royal jubilee monarchagasm. Break out the bunting, and let’s have a red white and blue street party.

Back in reality, as opposed to what the Tory papers say, Scotland said that it still wanted a majority of pro-independence MSPs. We still have a parliament which is as disposed to vote for another independence referendum as the previous one was. As far as the UK is concerned, Scotland is determined to keep its options open. However, in their desperation to clutch at any straw going and tell themselves that there had been an end to this whole nightmare which threatens their privilege, what the Tories saw and heard was a minor revival in their fortunes at the expense of the other main Unionist party and have mistaken this for an upswelling of British pride in a nation which remains as dubious about the UK as it did before the election.

On Sunday, Ruth Davidson said that when she heard pro-independence MSPs speak about independence she was reminded of those Second World War Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender even though their country had long since been defeated. Yet since the modern peaceful and democratic Scottish war of independence kicked off, where we fight with ballots not bullets and words not swords, there have been four public votes. In those four, the elections of 2011, 2015 and 2016 and the referendum of 2014, the independence campaign has scored three crushing victories and went down to one narrow defeat.

We’ve obliterated the heavy cavalry of Unionist MPs, wiped out the Unionist majority in Holyrood not once but twice, and increased public support for independence from under one third of the population to around a half. We’re poised to evict the Unionists from many of their local government strongholds next year. The west of Scotland, where 40 per cent of the country lives, which was the key reason for Labour’s former dominance, is now solidly pro-independence. The Union is on a very shoogly peg.

The independence campaign has taken the idea of independence from the margins of Scottish politics and not only brought it firmly into the mainstream, we’ve made it the key issue around which all Scottish politics revolves. With its EU referendum substituting for a Tory leadership contest the Tories are poised to shoot themselves in the foot and give Scotland another reason to hold a second independence referendum in which we’ll start off from a much stronger position and in which the Union will be severely weakened by having its key promises from the last time exposed as lies. Remember all those promises about jobs and ships and the nearest thing possible to home rule, not to mention the promise that our EU membership would only be safe if Scotland stayed in the UK.

If the UK votes to leave the EU in June and Scotland votes to remain, there will be no traction in Unionist scares about uncertainty when it’s remaining in the UK that will be the greatest uncertainty of all. There’s going to be a long and protracted exit negotiation and no settled outcome, the Unionist parties are going to have to try and sell that process to a Scottish electorate which had just rejected it in the EU referendum. It’s more than probable that Brussels will make Scotland an offer that we can’t refuse. Scotland could remain an EU member by inheriting the UK’s membership, with all the opt outs on the Euro and Schengen. British businesses which seek unfettered access to the EU markets will move to Scotland. And there’s nothing Ruth’s wee band of flag-wavers can do to prevent it.

Meanwhile, her party is tearing itself apart, and while they harp on about the divisions caused by the Scottish referendum, the deepest, the most cutting, and the bloodiest divisions are those opening up within the Conservative party as a result of this needless EU referendum. The two wings of the Tory party compete with one another to tell the most ridiculous, the scariest, the most over-hyped stories. The more hysterical they get, the more they destroy their own credibility.

Whatever the outcome of the vote on June 23, the Tories will come out of it weakened and fatally damaged by their self-inflicted wounds. And then Ruth is going to have to defend the actions of that party to the Scottish Parliament. Every week she’s going to be held to account for a lame-duck government that’s more preoccupied with its own leadership battles while it seeks to impose austerity and cuts. David Cameron’s stock has sunk so low in Westminster that some Tory MPs are now openly calling for another General Election. If he fails to win a large majority for remain in the referendum, there’s a toilet U-bend waiting for Cameron’s career, and the polls say it is too close to call.

There’s going to be a new campaignto make the case for independence starting over the summer, and without us raising a finger to point out the positive case for a Scotland that’s in charge of its own destiny, the Union is self-destructing.

So yeah Ruthie, that’s totally like refusing to accept the defeat of a Japan that’s just been nuked, has had its infrastructure utterly destroyed by a four-year campaign of carpet bombing by the Allies, and which is facing an invasion from the Soviet Union. We can only be relieved that her military career was short lived and is now over, because making an accurate assessment of a battlefield is clearly not her strong point. There are blind brain-damaged mice in laboratory mazes with a better grasp of strategy.