Kevin McKenna: Why losing Boris Johnson shouldn't worry the Yes movement

There he was wandering around a hospital in the early days of the pandemic, cheerfully maskless and making physical contact with edgy medical staff. He was laid low with the virus not long afterwards. And there he was again desperately defending Dominic Cummings after the chief adviser invented the ground-breaking Barnard Castle eyesight test.

Revelations about those Downing Street parties last year came not long after Johnson was seen once more wandering clueless around an English hospital as traumatised senior health staff pleaded with him to wear a mask. The Prime Minister’s current wife, Carrie, has just borne him his sixth or seventh child and, of course, congratulations to them both.

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But I wonder if the Westminster social services team might, even now, be considering a visit to the couple’s Downing Street flat. If this pandemic still has a few years to run and the Prime Minister is suspected of being just as cheerfully insouciant to protective measures in his home life might the wee one fall immediately into the at-risk category?

Johnson, though, is a walking, talking example of reverse psychology. By his advocacy of irresponsible behaviour in the face a lethal pandemic the nation can be in no doubt about the efficacy of taking all possible precautions. Even the Prime Minister’s own supporters know that he’s a lying trumpet who makes it up as he goes along. To the rest of the country he’s an end-of-the-pier, Punch and Judy show. No-one seriously wants to mimic in their own personal lives what he does.

We spend the entire year conveying messages of contempt around this man. He’s barely able to walk and talk at the same time. So what better advert for adopting preventative Covid measures than a Prime Minister who adopts such a foolish approach to the pandemic? If it was someone such as Angela Merkel behaving in this way that would be genuine cause for concern.

The nation’s chief medical officers should simply chill. The message is left unsaid but well understood: “Look, everyone knows the Prime Minister is a rocket and a hot dog. Need we say more?”

The febrile political atmosphere surrounding last week’s pictures of Johnson hosting a Christmas quiz while the rest of the nation was being ordered not to socialise saw bookmakers scurrying to open books on his possible successors. This, in turn, had several supporters of Scottish independence pausing to say “now haud on just a minute.” We were now being confronted with a troubling prospect.

This rests on the assumption that while Boris Johnson remains at Number 10 the outlook for Scottish independence will always seem bright. Recent opinion polls and the results of May’s Scottish election seem to confirm this. Even among those who were unconvinced by the Yes offering in 2014 there is a feeling that this Prime Minister is now just laughing at us.

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Once, his removal might indeed have seen him replaced by someone who at least looked like they knew what they were doing. Happily, the runners and riders among those considered to be Johnson’s most likely successors should not present too much cause for concern. All of them are as sociopathic and dim as the man they would replace.

By removing all those Tories whom he considered to be a bit suspect on a hard Brexit, Johnson also jettisoned the grown-up wing of the party. Those who have since occupied senior Cabinet positions would previously have been consigned to drawing the raffle at their constituency summer fund-raiser and conducting local worthies on personal tours of Parliament before standing them lunch in the Commons restaurant.

Or, if they were Priti Patel (below), they’d have been allowed simply to be clumsy about where she was putting her feet in the international arms sector.

Patel, though, is considered to be a serious contender to replace Johnson. Before she became Home Secretary, her career ought to have ended for conducting freelance meetings with the Israeli Government and senior Israeli business figures to discuss “international development” matters.

She had 14 (fourteen) such meetings and didn’t tell her boss about any of them. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that, in the midst of a volatile period in a volatile region, having a timeshare arrangement at the Knesset might not be conducive to an effective and sensitive diplomatic strategy in the region.

Since then, Patel’s attitude towards people fleeing torture and war in the Middle East seems to have been modelled on Britain’s foreign policy in this region during the 12th-century Crusades.

And I’m simply not having any of this nonsense about Rishi Sunak being the grown-up in the room.

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He’s certainly the richest person in the room. He has access to the sort of fortune that wouldn’t just send rockets into space but would probably make them big enough to accommodate a small Cotswolds housing development.

Sunak would have considered the Bullingdon Club to be a rough working man’s establishment.

Having him talking about austerity and the four equal parts of the UK will suit me right down to the ground in a future independence referendum.

We’re also told that Liz Truss (below) might fancy her chances. Liz Truss? Behave yourself. This is the woman who sought to win over a sceptical nation by announcing that the UK was now muscling in on the Beijing pork market. The last chap who tried that had his entrails put on public display during the Manchu conquest of China in 1644.

The UK Foreign Secretary has also made grandiloquent claims about British cheese. The English might regard her as a serious contender for prime minister, the rest of the world thinks she’s a Domino’s Pizza ambassador. Having her in charge during an independence referendum would be just the ticket too.

And then there’s Dominic Raab, the Baldrick of UK politics. Great Britain’s deputy Prime Minister thinks that taking the knee originated in Game of Thrones and seemed shocked about our reliance – as an island nation – on the Dover-Calais crossing.

As Brexit Secretary he was happy to admit he hadn’t read the 32-page-short Good Friday Agreement. “It’s not like a novel where you sit down and say ‘you know what, this is a cracking read’.”

The Union will remain reassuringly unsafe in Tory hands – no matter who’s in charge – right up until the next independence referendum. No danger whatsoever.