IT’S easy to knock Andrea Leadsom. That’s twice she’s thrown her hat in the ring for the Tory leadership and twice it’s been tossed back, misshapen and covered in dirt.

The first time she managed a respectable 66 votes in the first round. The best that can be said about her second attempt is that she managed to scrape one more vote than the bloke no-one’s heard of.

In July 2016 her biggest mistake was to suggest she was more suited to the role of Prime Minister than Theresa May because her status as a mother gave her “a very real stake” in the future of the country. In June 2019 her most glaring error was saying that the people of Scotland should – maybe, possibly – be entitled to a say about their country’s constitutional future post-Brexit.

Was she caught off guard by the question at her campaign launch on Tuesday? It seems unlikely.

After all, her rivals had been queuing up to trumpet about how they would refuse to grant a Section 30 order if they were to emerge from this unedifying mud-wrestle with the keys to Downing Street.

As an enthusiastic user of Twitter (She likes to use exclamation marks! To emphasis her points!) Leadsom must surely have seen the #PermissionFromSajid ridicule heaped on the Home Secretary after he declared he would not “allow” a second independence referendum. Perhaps it was this that inspired her to strike out on her own, saying “never say never” when asked how she’d respond to the same request.

Or perhaps Leadsom was being sincere when she said “I am a big believer in devolution and so I am not going to stand here and utterly rule it out, because I think that is disrespectful”.

Maybe she agrees with Nicola Sturgeon that a stance of stubborn refusal would become untenable if the worst happens and the UK jumps off the no-deal cliff.

She did, after all, once describe any kind of Brexit as “a disaster for our economy” that would lead to “a decade of economic and political uncertainty at a time when the tectonic plates of global success are moving”, although she doesn’t seem very keen to be reminded about that six years later, when telling the unpalatable truth is the quickest way to lose support.

Maybe, too, when she tweeted during her campaign that the new Prime Minister “must have a positive, uplifting vision for the next chapter in our nations’ great history” she really meant to put the apostrophe there. Maybe she was recognising that the UK isn’t, in fact, “one nation” at all. Imagine that.

While the likes of Dominic Raab and Esther McVey had folk reaching for their dictionaries in recent days to check whether threats to “prorogue” parliament were as sinister and anti-democratic as they sounded, the Leader of the House of Commons was expressing her belief in sovereignty and insisting everything would be up for negotiation in a Leadsom-led UK. She must, of course, be well aware that in Scotland the people are sovereign, given there was a debate about the Claim of Right, in the very House of Commons of which she is leader, just a year ago.

What a contrast to her rivals.

What a disastrous strategy. How naive the slogan “decisive and compassionate” seems when compared with the divisive and contemptuous approach of the current front-runner, who has barely bothered to campaign at all yet is galloping ahead in terms of both endorsements from MPs and support from the Tory party members who will ultimately choose the new Prime Minister.

Leadsom’s messaging was never going to help her in this particular contest. Democracy? Negotiation? Respect? What did she think she was playing at? She was fighting a very different leadership campaign from most of her rivals, who understand that bluster, bulldozing and bullying is the combination most likely to hoover up votes.

It didn’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference that Leadsom actually topped one poll, which asked people who would be best placed to defeat Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in a General Election. In the topsy-turvy UK we now inhabit, the ability to win a General Election is pretty much an irrelevance whereas the ability to dodge one is a sign of strength and cunning.

Upon realising her strategic error Leadsom did, of course, perform a handbrake turn, tweeting a new line so quickly there wasn’t even time to run it through a spellchecker: “There will be no second referendums on my watch – not on Scottish Independance [sic] and not on EU membership. I respect the result of referendums!”

It was a reversal to make Scotland’s champion flip-flopper Ruth Davidson proud. Perhaps the two women compared notes before the branch office leader – in full panic mode as Scotland’s worst nightmare sails towards victory – issued her latest edict.

Davidson might never come right out and say “never”, but presumably by the time of Johnson’s coronation she’ll be saying that until the SNP win 101% of the vote, Scotland win the World Cup and pigs fly past Bute House, there will never be a second referendum. She’s probably already got a draft bill ready to go, demanding a moratorium on porcine jetpack production.

The Tories can keep finding new and creative ways to tell us “no” – but for how much longer?