Stuart Cosgrove: This dishevelled primate climbed to top of UK

You may have seen the movie Buddy (1997), a comedy-of-manners set in 1920s New York featuring a stellar Scottish cast including Robbie Coltrane as a Manhattan millionaire, Dr Bill Lintz and the ubiquitous Alan Cumming as the charming houseboy, Dick Croner.

Based on a true story, Buddy follows the mixed fortunes of the eccentric socialite Trudy Linz who is obsessed with African wildlife and lives in a mansion with a brood of animals, including chimpanzees and tigers she raises as her children.

The narrative takes a dramatic turn when Linz discovers a dangerously ill baby gorilla who she decides to care for, and –in a bizarre social experiment – trains the gorilla to become a privileged and well-refined human being.

It is an experiment destined to go horribly wrong. All of which brings us back to the chaos of British politics and the private life of the beleaguered Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It is impossible to watch the film Buddy without thinking of Johnson: his bumbling presence, his amoral awkwardness and his capacity for generating chaos all around him.

As Buddy grows up to become a healthy teenage gorilla, his strength tips out of control. The family dress him in formal evening wear, and he prowls the house breaking antique chairs and dropping trays of crystal glass. He looks for all the world like Johnson in those excruciating Bullingdon Club photographs – over-dressed and a dangerously entitled sociopath, wholly unsuited to the complexities of public service.

Buddy the gorilla deports the same shambling persona as Johnson – his shirt is scruffily awry, his hair wanders askew like the proverbial burst couch, and his arse bulges from trousers which hang like old mail sacks at Larbert Station.

Like Johnson, Buddy blunders around the mansion, scratching his balls like the master splaffer as he “eats, shoots and leaves”.

There is a doctoral thesis to be written about how much harm those Bullingdon Club photographs have done to British public life. They are a prequel of events that should never have been allowed to happen and which have harmed British democracy – firstly by David Cameron’s blasé commitment to a Brexit referendum brought into being largely to satisfy the far right of his own party, which paved the way for the deracination of Theresa May and the eventual triumph of Johnson, the barely socialised gorilla. What is it about Britain and its English backwaters that still seem happy to be under the grip of ancient class structures and social snobbery?

As brutal reality punctured Johnson’s shield of invincibility last Thursday, Nicola Sturgeon delivered an unforgiving epistle on his time in Downing Street. “Boris Johnson was always manifestly unfit to be PM”, she wrote. “…and the Tories should never have elected him leader or sustained him in office for as long as they have. But the problems run much deeper than one individual. The Westminster system is broken.”

Sir Keir Starmer refused to pull punches too: “He’s inflicted lies, fraud and chaos in the country.”

Together they may yet conspire to bring a vote of no confidence to the house.

What we should never forget in the week that Johnson stymied Scottish democracy by refusing to grant a Section 30 order, is that he knowingly risked the UK economy by enabling Brexit – in part for his own personal ambition.

Scotland has always had a healthier disrespect for the posh and the entitled, and whilst there are huge disparities of wealth within our own society, I would argue that we are not as easily seduced by the swaggering self-confidence of the English public school system or the superficial dressage of the ruling classes.

Whilst it would be naive to suggest that the politics of social snobbery have been entirely expunged from our national culture, Scotland seems less enthralled by the trappings of old wealth and class as the deep south.

An excruciating sidebar of Johnson’s resignation is that Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary and a member of Scotland’s landed gentry, was one of a small coterie who supported Johnson to the bitter end. Flanked by the anachronistic Jacob Rees-Mogg and the semi-detached Nadine Dorries, Jack hung on, devoid of principle as all around him jumped ship.

There is not much to like about the “bool-in-the-mooth” Scottish Secretary, as he embraced ideological contradictions, hanging around Downing Street, like a parcelled rogue, loyal to the end.

And to reiterate how deeply this scandal was so deeply enmeshed in class, you have to recall that it was triggered by a Tory whip drunkenly accosting two unwilling young men in the Carlton Club after a Tory Friends of Cyprus soiree. Chris Pincher supposedly staggered over old leather armchairs, grasping at glasses of red wine, after the champagne run out.

The whole scenario will seem strange to most ordinary people – and like a foreign country to many Scots.

The idea that Johnson plans to remain as Prime Minister with a new hastily convened cabinet, raises the prospect that he will use his last few months in power to enable his contacts to breach the guidelines separating politicians from undue influence, and – to put at its very crudest – he may flagrantly line his pockets before he finally leaves.

A virulent rumour was spreading even as he was delivering his resignation speech that Johnson and his wife had been planning a wedding party at Chequers over the summer, and that hanging on was a priority. What is deeply depressing about this rumour is that whether it is true or false, it’s so crushingly believable.

Like the marauding gorilla of Hollywood, I predict Johnson’s careless entitlement will swipe through the Nolan Principles as if they are a china vase on a teetering mantlepiece.

Although the Lintz household in the movie Buddy is decoratively charming, it is driven by the naive and fantastical ideal that a menagerie of “big dogs” and “wriggling snakes” can be converted to a well-ordered society.

The trials and tribulations of Buddy reach their crisis point at Chicago’s World Fair, when Lintz is invited to display the gorilla and chimps at the Chicago World’s Fair. Accidentally freed by one of the family’s chimps, the gorilla escapes, runs amok and terrorises visitors to the Fair. It has the same unpredictable mayhem of Johnson’s last days: a vile kind of herd instinct.

Captured, sedated and then taken back to the Lintz mansion, Buddy becomes moody and uncontrollable, until he eventually turns on his own mistress and attacks her in a bestial rage: wrecking the family home, and all but ending the family’s social experiment.

Buddy’s lurching and dishevelled look as he smashes through the luxury home is disarmingly like Johnson’s last days in power, a masterclass in enraged self-harm.

For all his superficial policy pronouncements and his obsession with baseless catchphrases – “Get Brexit Done”, “Now Is Not the Time” and “Levelling Up” – Johnson was undone by his own overbearing personality and flaws that were in plain sight since the days of the Bullingdon Club photographs.

It was entirely predictable that when Buddy’s place in public life ended, it would be with colossal violence and the primate’s scream. Perhaps it was equally predictable that Johnson’s departing speech would be devoid of self-awareness, so sullen and almost vengeful, burnt up by the belief that responsibility lay not with himself but with the unnamed herd and the vagaries of Darwinism. I will not miss this reprehensible clown, and nor will what’s left of Britain.