1. Brexit

Since we left the European Union on January 1 it has literally been one disaster after another. Never has a British Prime presided over – indeed brought about – such a miserable litany of catastrophes.

Pretty much the minute the Brexit deal the Prime Minister “negotiated” kicked in everything started to fall apart. And surprise, surprise, Scotland bore the brunt and continues to do so.

First our fishing industry was dragged to the brink of disaster as a new mountain of red tape kept fresh produce rotting in parked lorries while drivers and officials scratched their heads about the form filling required.

Firms staged a lorry rally to Downing Street to protest but still the cost of the damage rose, reaching more than a £1 million a day as fish markets in the north of Scotland grew to resemble a ghost town.

Our fishing industry was the highest-profile casualty of Johnson’s useless Brexit deal but it isn’t the only one.

Small firms have had to give up exporting to Europe altogether because the extra costs meant it was no longer worth it to even try to attract European customers.

Now the attention has switched to our farming industry, threatened by a flood of cheaper produce from Australia – and no doubt from the US in future – where food standards are nowhere near as high as in Britain.

Our Prime Minister believes this possibly fatal blow to many of our farmers is a price worth paying for the PR coup of announcing the first trade deal after Brexit.

It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if we sign on the dotted line to allow Australia access to British markets with no tariffs and no regulation that will be the benchmark for other deals. You cannot put the genetically modified chicken back in the can once it’s been allowed to run amok in our supermarkets.

Have we had an apology for this catalogue of errors? Of course not. Instead we were fobbed off with complacent assurances that what we were seeing amounted to little more than teething problems.

The emptiness of those assurances was laid bare this week when official figures showed a drop in EU trade of almost a quarter at the start of 2021 compared with the same period three years ago.

And yet all this has bothered Tory voters south of the Border not a jot. Indeed the Prime Minister’s popularity is higher than it was at the beginning of the year, before Brexit began to bite. So high that talk of his calling for a snap general election is actually been taken seriously.

2. Covid

According to Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson suggested getting his chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty to inject him with Covid on TV to convince the public that all this talk of a global pandemic was simply hyperbole.

Read that again. The British Prime Minister actually talked about a stunt that even Donald Trump might have thought was over the top. After all, the American president wasn’t actually filmed drinking bleach.

Cummings’s evidence to a joint session of the Commons Health and Science and Technology Committee yesterday was laced with poison for his former boss. He said a political system which gave voters a choice between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn is “terribly wrong” and created a situation of “lions led by donkeys”.

The Prime Minister should have sacked his health secretary for “at least 15 to 20 things” including lying at meetings.

According to Cummings, Boris Johnson said Matt Hancock had told him in the cabinet room that elderly people would be tested before being sent back to care homes. They were not. Johnson’s former chief adviser told the committees that “senior ministers, senior officials and senior advisers like me fell disastrously short of what the public expects during a crisis like this”.

For most prime ministers, evidence like this would be a political death sentence. Johnson just shrugs and orders the balloons for street parties to celebrate his wedding.

3. Democracy

We live in a parliamentary democracy. Until recently that has meant we vote for political parties based on the policies in their manifestos and whichever party wins, through whatever electoral system is in place, gets to press ahead with those plans.

Boris Johnson seems to have an entirely different definition: whatever he says goes, regardless of how people vote.

He’s got some previous here. In the EU referendum Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in Europe. Wales and England voted to leave. We left.

Sheer force of numbers dragged the more recalcitrant members of the Union out of the EU but you might have thought democracy dictated at least some recognition that the Union was split and therefore a softer type of Brexit was required to acknowledge the minority view. See number one above.

That was bad enough Johnson’s stance on a second referendum on independence was proof positive that democracy isn’t part of his masterplan for the Union.

The SNP manifesto for the Scottish election contained a commitment to hold indyref2 in the next parliamentary term. No one who voted for the party could have been in any doubt as to its intentions.

The SNP won the election. By a landslide. They have 64 MSPs, more than double the 31 seats won by the Tories.

Let’s be generous. Let’s say it’s possible that some of those who voted for the SNP are not convinced that independence offers the best future for Scotland.

What is certain, however, is that the prospect of taking part in an independence referendum did not stop them voting for the SNP. In other words they were comfortable enough with the prospect of indyref2 to vote for a party that promised to deliver it.

We have no democratic responsibility to win all the arguments about independence in order to hold a referendum. That’s the wrong way round. The SNP and the Greens have a resounding, undeniable mandate to hold the referendum first and we can win the arguments later, before that vote is held.

If Boris Johnson tries to stop that vote any party which purports to believe in democracy has a responsibility to stand against him. Will they?

4. Northern Ireland

It has been obvious that Brexit has been a threat to peace in Northern Ireland since the EU referendum.

The European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen this week dismissed suggestions that recent tensions in Northern Ireland had been caused by the protocol agreed to avoid a hard border in between Northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland.

“There should be no doubt that there is no alternative to the full and correct implementation of the protocol,” she said. “And I think it is important to reiterate that the protocol is the only possible solution to ensure peace and stability in Northern Ireland while protecting the integrity of the European Union’s single market.

“If we see problems today we should not forget that they do not come from the protocol but they result from Brexit. That is the reason why the problems are there.”

If that isn’t a stinking rebuke to Boris Johnson then I don’t know what is.

5. Eurovision

Oh relax ... I’m only joking.