EVEN if he were as pure as the driven snow with regard to lockdown parties (and he isn’t) Johnson’s attack on Keir Starmer on Monday should have been enough to guarantee his expulsion from elected office.

To accuse a former state prosecutor of deliberately failing to bring to justice a notorious paedophile is about as serious a charge as you can levy. To do so when hiding behind parliamentary privilege while fully aware that there isn’t a shred of truth in what is a crackpot internet smear is the action of a cornered charlatan, viciously desperate to save his own skin and willing to say or do anything to that end.

But Johnson’s despicable tactics not only speak volumes about him. They also speak volumes about those who continue to support him, including the increasingly aggressive Nadine Dorries, the increasingly sycophantic Dominic Raab and the increasingly ludicrous Secretary of State against Scotland, Alister Jack – all of whom, of course, depend on Johnson for their jobs. They are prepared to defend the indefensible – literally – just to stay on the Westminster gravy train.

The culture of lying is now endemic among Tory frontbenchers but it has been like that for some time. For example, they continually assert how positive and productive their relationship is with the devolved administrations when actually they are actively working against their supposed partners every day.

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This reality was demonstrated again on Sunday when the UK Attorney General Suella Braverman informed the Scottish and Welsh governments – at the last minute – that the Tories intended to further undermine devolution by changing the way in which legacy European regulation can be altered.

This appears a somewhat technical issue but in fact it strikes at the heart of devolved competence. The UK Government will be able to ride roughshod over the parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff and ensure that the flexibility of the Scottish and Welsh governments to align with higher European standards is further curtailed.

The Tories have decided on this move as a further sop to hard right Brexiteers, pretending it will unleash the “Benefits of Brexit”, although there aren’t any.

In fact, the formal announcement was made in the context of a risibly threadbare paper under that title released some hours later. It was one of two such documents published this week, the other being Michael Gove’s equally risible and threadbare proposals for “levelling up”.

Far from charting a course ahead, they merely confirm a truth encapsulated in the now almost universal cartoon depiction of Johnson as an emperor with no clothes. All his vaunted claims of success such as creating the “fastest growing economy in the G7”, organising the “world-beating” vaccine rollout and “getting

Brexit done” are nothing but self-congratulating and self-deluding boastful lies.

YET even with such an open goal, Labour in Scotland are unable to focus on what matters. Instead, within a matter of hours of Starmer’s weekend visit north of the Border – when he droned on yet again about mythical “more powers” – two senior Labour figures were loudly demonstrating how tone deaf that party remains to our country’s needs.

Jack Straw’s venomous attack on Ian Blackford and the SNP looked like nothing more than desperate attention-seeking by a discredited figure from the distant past. Yet it is noticeable that he, like Ian Murray (Scotland’s sole Labour MP who scrapes by only on grace and favour Tory votes) believes Labour must appear even more Unionist than the most flag-waving John Bull and even more Brexiteer than Ukip.

So while Straw was irrelevantly spluttering, Murray was writing to the head of the UK Civil Service seeking to have powers removed from Holyrood. In his letter Murray demanded that (uniquely) Scottish civil servants be forbidden from accepting instruction from their duly elected government and that they cease all work on independence as a result.

He was quickly echoed by a range of Unionist extremists, most of whom couldn’t get themselves elected to the committee of a bowling club but who regularly pop up from self-appointed positions in well-funded think tanks, pontificating about democracy while working as hard as they can to suppress it.

We have been here before. In 2013 some Unionists were outraged that the norm of a civil service working to implement the policy of the elected government was in operation in Scotland. However, their disingenuous and partisan posturing was quickly and comprehensively rebuffed by the then UK Cabinet Secretary and one would hope the same would happen again this time, although given the corruption of the political system that Johnson has brought about nothing can be certain.

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The purpose of Murray’s attack is, of course, to deny the right of the Scottish people to determine their own future. Not only should we be refused a referendum to decide it, our government must also be forbidden to work towards it. To Labour, independence is a thought crime which needs crushed by any and every possible means.

The hypocrisy of such a move from a man who once observed, when arguing for a second Brexit referendum that “we have the right to change our minds” is staggering, but then the experience of going to Westminster sometimes seems to turn the heads even of those not already turned by privilege and patronage.

That is why Ian Blackford was such a breath of fresh air for so many, north and south of the Border, this week. He was prepared to tell the truth, and not to twist it in order to serve himself and profit only his own interests. He spoke as a person, not a politician.

His target was Johnson and the infuriating, smirking, public schoolboy exceptionalism which was oozing out of every dishonest pore as he wriggled at the despatch box but his denunciation of double standards also applies also to those who pay lip service to democracy yet actually spend their time seeking every devious means to try and deny it to their fellow citizens.