LET’S not put all our independence eggs in the Bojo basket.

Watching the interview where Boris Johnson describes painting crates to look like small buses I began to wonder if I had unwittingly entered a parallel universe.

Johnson told TalkRadio: “I like to paint. Or I make things. I have a thing where I make models of buses. What I make is, I get old, I don’t know, wooden crates, and I paint them. It’s a box that’s been used to contain two wine bottles, right, and it will have a dividing thing. And I turn it into a bus.

A leading academic called that “so bizarre it’s mesmerising”.

There is another description. Terrifying.

Add that to Johnson’s casual endorsement of a no-deal Brexit with his quipped rejoinder, “Do or Die”, and it’s no wonder Boris is catnip for EU-favouring Scots and a not-so-secret weapon for converting swithering No voters. Johnson has a personal approval rating of minus 37 north of the Border and a Panelbase poll on Monday found that if he becomes prime minister, 53% of Scots sampled say they will back independence. According to SNP depute leader Keith Brown: “It’s a stunning poll that shows independence is within touching distance.”

Agreed. Boris is blustering, entitled, couldn’t-care-less upper-crust Englishness at its worst.

But what if that means he loses to Jeremy Hunt? The catastrophe of Boris Johnson anywhere near levers of power will be averted along with a no-deal Brexit (presumably).

But will Prime Minister Jeremy Hunt provoke any exodus to Yes? And if not, could that be, in part, because we’ve all turned Boris into a bogeyman when he’s only the most unacceptable in a bunch of Tory candidates who’ve presided over benefit cuts so savage, thousands of despairing claimants have killed themselves and a Universal Credit system so dysfunctional young mothers have been forced into prostitution. Yet Boris and Jeremy manage to sleep at night.

So, let’s redress the balance a bit and talk up the downsides of challenger Jeremy Hunt.

Alarmingly, there are no sensible left-wing critiques of Hunt online. All the ammo against the current foreign secretary is coming from Boris supporters desperate to assert that Jezza ain’t as tough as their guy.

Panelbase did find Hunt is almost as unpopular as Boris here – he shares an approval rating of minus 24 with Nigel Farage. Yet I don’t think the pollsters asked those sampled if Hunt’s election as Tory leader and PM would trigger a Boris-like migration towards independence? Once again, if not, why not?

Could it be that we are unconsciously but rapidly building the dangerous narrative that only a cataclysm of Boris-sized proportions can build a majority for Scottish independence – which means Scotland’s collective foot could come right off the pedal, if his disintegrating campaign hits the buffers and Hunt gets the top job instead.

Why is Jeremy getting off scot-free? Well, the absence of an active independence campaign isn’t helping. Political debate is fixated on two hopeless men vying for Britain’s top job and producing marginally different approaches on the Hobson’s choice of a destructive Brexit versus a hugely damaging Brexit. That isn’t a wide enough tableau to have a grown-up debate about Scotland’s future. Some tangible, fleshed-out and freshly baked independent alternatives to Brexiting Britain would come in gey useful now. In their absence, many Scots have been left to think that simply stopping Boris is a result. It’s not.

Having stayed in no Cabinet post for long, Boris’s problem is the lack of a track record (unless you count his underwhelming performance as London Mayor). But don’t let experience become the only measuring stick, because it unfairly flatters the experienced but fairly naff Jeremy Hunt.

In 2005 he became shadow minister for disabled people, “a reward for supporting David Cameron, who attended Oxford University at the same time as him, in the Conservative leadership election”, according to the BBC website.

In 2009, he breached expenses rules and had to repay almost £10k for letting his agent stay rent-free in a constituency property, designated as his second home and funded by the taxpayer.

As culture secretary Hunt was responsible for the shambolic proposed takeover of BSkyB by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and criticised for messages he exchanged with James Murdoch on the bid.

The Leveson inquiry released texts sent from Hunt to a News Corp lobbyist addressing him as “Daddy” and “mon ami”. It seems their wives had just given birth in the same hospital. Hunt’s special adviser was forced to quit – but Hunt was rewarded with the post of health secretary and went on to preside over the biggest ever collapse in NHS spending in 2010, when the usual 4% above inflation spending rise was slashed to just 1%.

The result of that savage cut has been appalling. Lots of English hospitals have gone into the red, patients have been dying on trolleys and in ambulances, private companies like Virgin have taken over entire health board systems and targets in cancer care, hospital appointments and A&E waiting times have been missed for four years running. In 2016, junior doctors took part in walkouts when Hunt ended overtime – part of his bid to have a seven-day NHS on the cheap. On two strike days, emergency care wasn’t provided for the first time in NHS history. So what did Jeremy do? He imposed the new contract on junior doctors anyway.

Having wreaked havoc in health, Hunt moved on to become foreign secretary in 2018, after Boris quit over Theresa May’s Brexit strategy. Since then Hunt has defended selling arms to the Saudi regime, and has just announced plans to boost defence spending by £15bn.

Warmonger Hunt will also slash business taxes to the lowest level in Europe and reduce corporation tax in a desperate attempt to attract firms to Britain after Brexit.

His manifesto is a weary, elitist shopping list of measures which stand no hope of counteracting the economic disaster he is prepared to enact. It’s a Charterhouse solution to a Del Boy dilemma – produced by his own nasty party and laid at the door of Scottish voters as if Jeremy should get a medal for drinking Irn-Bru, banning foreign visits by Nicola Sturgeon and not being Boris.

Make no mistake. Hunt will deliver ordinary Tory pain – the kind that prompted Scots to vote his party out of every single seat in 1997, long, long before Brexit. The poisonous nature of the present Tory contest arises from a land beyond the noxious personalities of the individual candidates. It’s the Tory party, it’s the Tory membership, it’s the status quo, it’s the weakness of opposition at Westminster, it’s England’s built-in right-wing majority that is rarely overcome for longer than one parliament, it’s the competitive, elitist templates of control that occupy the thought patterns of SNP politicians.

It’s the knowledge that our shift to a green economy cannot be delivered while Westminster runs energy policy. It’s the certainty that ending inequality cannot be achieved through mitigating cruel benefits – absolutely necessary though moves like the new income supplement are, meantime.

It’s the fact that remote governance in Scotland will never be acknowledged as a problem let alone fixed, as long as top-down Britain keeps making centralised Scotland look good, and market-led Westminster makes radical, co-operative ideas about land ownership, community-size democracy and housing look too whacky for Scots to embrace – even though they’re mainstream everywhere else.

We desperately need independence to rescue Scotland from its centuries-long dependence on foosty British thinking. So, let’s not be lured into training all our guns on Boris. He’s just one variation on a totally worn-out Posh Boy theme.

Despite all the temptations, let’s keep the heid and play the argument, not the man.