Boris Johnson's jaunt to Scotland is a slap in the face for all who live here

FAIR do’s, we learned quite a bit from the Johnson state visit north of the locked-down border.

We know the blonde bumbler can open the lid on a box and remove the contents under instruction.

It’s clear, he’s mastered the complicated art of the elbow bump.

And he’s found a foolproof way of stopping those he meets adopting unacceptably rude expressions – just get them all to mask up.

Previously, when he’s ventured over Hadrian’s wall, his praetorian guard have whisked him to stage managed locations in the north east.

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This had the inestimable advantage of putting him in contact with the minimum number of actual electors, given that so few of them ever vote for his party, and those who do tend to cluster mainly in that wee blue corner.

Last time round he met fisherfolk and posed for happy snaps with a couple of crabs – the kind that no longer have a post-Brexit, pre-death passport to visit EU restaurants.

The PM strutting around fishing ports, for all the obvious reasons, would clearly have been too hazardous on this latest trip oop north. A slap round the chops with a wet haddie can be quite painful.

Then again it was a quite different agenda he was here to push this time around. So no accident that the labs, mass vaccine centre and vaccine production unit were all selected to make the visual point that the broad shoulders of the UK Treasury were all that stood between Scotland and penury.

According to little Mr Gove, the Number Ten press office, and even Labour Leader Keir Starmer, it made perfect sense for the premier to flout all travel bans and come among us in person. How else could he have obtained that vital first-hand knowledge from front line staff?

LISTEN: Glaswegians tell Boris Johnson exactly what they think of his visit

Are they having a laugh? The rest of the locked-down world, even the technically haunless such as your correspondent, have long since got up close but not dangerously personal with the help of Facetime, Skype and Zoom. Even that old-tech option of the phone.

Obviously, nobody had had the bottle to tell the PM that the more Scots saw of him in person, the more likely they were to vote Yes next time round.

As the FM pointed out, she’d have got pelters if she had suggested she needed to go from Edinburgh to Aberdeen to get first-hand reports on site.

All these alibis were no more than ministerial mince. Johnson was in Scotland because it had suddenly dawned on them down there that up here we might be for the off. Twenty plus opinion polls with a majority for independence are difficult to brush off as a blip.

Which very points were put to the PM as he toured a new vaccination plant in Livingston. Cue much harrumphing about “pointless constitutional wrangling”, and, gobsmackingly, about having a referendum without being clear about what would happen afterwards.

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This from the man who barrelled on with Brexit when it became ever clearer that nobody had a scooby what the likely effects would be, or, if they did, decided that the Brextremists must be placated at all costs.

Even when the goalposts had been shifted so far from the proposition offered in June 2016 that nobody could even remember where the pitch was.

What was important, said our glorious leader, was “the power of doing things together”.

Tell that to M. Barnier.