IN my previous column for The National, I got stuck into Boris Johnson a bit. So, in the spirit of fairness and equality, I’m going to turn to Jeremy Hunt in this column – although, now that Ruth Davidson has endorsed Hunt, there’s a good chance he’ll be out the running by the time this heads off to the presses.

Hunt, as I said in my most recent column, has tried to paint himself as the person who can solve the Brexit crisis because he is some sort of great negotiator. He seems to believe that a hard Brexit can be avoided if he picks up a phone and has a chat with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. He alone has the wit, grit, drive and charm to persuade those two to push the rest of the EU 27 into ditching the Irish backstop.

It’s utter nonsense. This man couldn’t renegotiate the junior doctors’ contract in the English NHS. And let us be clear on the junior doctors’ strike. When they went out on strike in 2016, it was the first time they had taken industrial action since the 1970s. How the man, who couldn’t persuade members of the union – which is least likely to take strike action out of any union in the UK – to stay in their posts, can claim to have the ability to persuade members of the European Union to break rank and change course, I don’t know. It’s embarrassing, frankly.

So, a great negotiator? No. Overconfident and full of his own importance, more likely.

There’s no real way to fit this into the rest of the column, so I’m just going to put it here in the middle – Jeremy Hunt was caught texting a Sky News lobbyist calling him “Daddy”. Make of that what you will.

Beyond negotiating the impossible when it comes to Brexit, Jeremy Hunt’s policy platform is bog standard, boring, repetitive Tory drivel.

His transformative plan for Government includes cutting corporation tax, and a lot of talk of increasing spending everywhere, particularly the military (by the way, trickle-down economics doesn’t work). The only place Jeremy Hunt deviates for the status quo in any meaningful way is saying he’ll drop the Tory target for reducing migration. I don’t know about you, but to me it sounds like a Tory greatest hits album. It’s a brutally uninspiring platform.

And true to Tory form, he’s a hypocrite. Video was widely circulating this week where Jeremy Hunt was seen saying he knows a company that employs some 300 odd people and all those jobs rely on continued uninterrupted access to the European Market.

He goes on to say that if those people have to lose their jobs to deliver Brexit that’s fine by him. The hypocrisy comes in when you discover he was recently quoted he wants to turn Britain into “the next Silicon Valley”. I don’t know that Silicon Valley would have grown into the huge technological hub that it is if the US government had been threatening to take a hop, skip and jump out of their greatest trading relationship for years, but seemingly Jeremy Hunt disagrees.

Despite all this, his campaign has been doing well this week – not as a result of his own talent, but as a result of Boris Johnson’s absolute ineptitude. In my previous column I said that I didn’t think Boris Johnson is as stupid as Donald Trump. He is entitled and arrogant and has demonstrated this all week by ducking out of debates, painting buses and generally being unable to answer the most basic of questions.

But despite benefiting from Boris Johnson’s bumbling idiocy on a UK level, from a Scottish perspective, Jeremy Hunt’s had an absolute nightmare this week.

Beginning with a cringey picture with an Irn-Bru can, taking a sharp turn into the bizarre with some tweets about his blood, and culminating in the McCarthyesque removal of Foreign Office support for the First Minister when she represents the Scottish people overseas.

There was also a short detour into claiming Scotland is buzzing about the third runway at Heathrowville – which is a town I’m not particularly interested in ever visiting.

This Tory leadership contest, where a tiny portion of the population will choose the leader of the entire country, shines a light on the democratic deficiencies of the UK system. It is sad, frankly, that the only alternative to the idiot candidate is the not-quite-as-bad candidate.

A more fitting microcosm of UK politics in recent years would be hard to find.