HAS anyone seen Douglas Ross and the rest of the Scottish Tories? Someone needs to tell them that their tea is oot, and that their goose isn't just cooked, it's been burned to a crisp, carbonised and turned into charcoal briquettes that are being used to roast what little is left of their dignity.
Douglas and the rest of the Scottish Tories, who are usually all over the telly milking any moral outrage that they can squeeze out of the latest SNP bad story, have all gone into hiding after wee Dougie declared that Boris Johnson needs to resign following the allegations of boozy parties at Downing Street during lock down and got slapped down as an inconsequential lightweight by Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Not a single Scottish Conservative MP, MSP or even a local councillor was available to appear on BBC Scotland's politics show over the weekend despite numerous attempts from the producers to find a current Conservative politician to come on the programme. They had to make do with former MSP Adam Tomkins, who repeated his infeasible call for the Scottish Conservatives to declare independence from the UK party and who rubbed salt in Douglas Ross's wounds by saying that if he does nothing, if Johnson survives and does not then resign himself, he will be in the humiliating position of having proven Rees-Mogg right and showing everyone that he is in fact a lightweight.
Ross was then further undermined by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack, who not only refused to join in the call for Johnson's resignation from the man who is supposedly the head of the Conservatives in Scotland, but pointedly let it be known that Ross had ignored his advice to refrain from making a statement until after the civil service investigation into the parties has reported its findings.
It’s noticeable that none of the other Scottish Conservative MPs at Westminster have openly backed his call for Johnson to resign, the closest he got to support came from Andrew Bowie who said that Rees-Mogg should apologise and insisted that Ross was no lightweight, and to be fair Bowie knows a lot about being a lightweight. However, even he stopped short of joining in Ross's call for Johnson's resignation.
The other fatuous four Scottish Tory MPs are staying very quiet and hoping no one will notice them, waiting to see if Johnson will survive the scandal. If he does, then the position of Douglas Ross and those Scottish Tory MSPs who have backed him becomes untenable. You cannot be the leader of the most aggressively British nationalist party at Holyrood while insisting that the British Prime Minister is unfit for office. Neither can the Scottish party secede from the UK Conservatives as then it would have to explain why independence is good for them but not for anyone else, while defending a Westminster system where Scotland has no representation at all in the British government.
Meanwhile, the Downing Street booze machine is not staying still and has embarked on a campaign to save Johnson's political skin with what it’s calling "Operation Red Meat", by announcing a raft of right-wing populist measures aimed at firming up support for the Prime Minister. These include the announcement that the BBC licence fee is to be abolished and the army is to be used to tackle the flow of refugees and asylum seekers across the English Channel which means that this government is trying to distract us from not being able to see dying relatives whilst they partied by pandering to racism against refugees. It's both desperate and vile.
Next up, they will be picking more fights with the EU, ripping up the Northern Irish Brexit deal, painting a massive Union flag on the white cliffs of Dover, and trying to bring back the death penalty and National Service. It's not so much Operation Red Meat as Operation Mince.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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