Joanna Blythman on Boris Johnson

One of the best things about living in Scotland is that you can be sure that Boris Johnson will never, ever, get to run anything. We could safely rate his chances of becoming an MP or MSP as being within spitting distance of nil. Not even the most backward council, the most croney-ridden quango, or the most desperate NGO would be daft enough to give him air space.

For all that the Scots are prone to sectarianism, for all that we love to prolong unproductive debates and divisions just for the sake of it, when confronted with the prospect of Boris taking on any credible public office, the nation would unite against him like a shot.

For nationalists, Boris is a one-man advert for independence, the very incarnation of everything that is bad about the English. "See, I told you so" I can hear them say. "That's what we need to get away from."

To the typically left-leaning, social democratic urban Scot, this Billy Bunteresque, Eton and Oxford-educated joker personifies the odious class privilege that riddles English society and seems so alien to Scotland's more democratic, inclusive image of itself. Boris is a living, breathing, babbling example of how having thousands spent on your education is no guarantee that you learn anything much. He only has to open his mouth, and out comes a stream of ignorance.

His Spectator editorial about "the deeply unattractive psyche" of Liverpudlians (for which read the inhabitants of any working-class city), his stream of impromptu, redneck asides about "orgies of cannibalism", "watermelon smiles" and "piccaninnies" are recorded by commentators as "Boris's gaffes". But these are not uncharacteristic mistakes. The scary thing is that they offer a revealing insight into how the man actually thinks.

Boris is a ghastly anachronism who makes the Duke of Edinburgh look politically correct. "Eek! A black person! Never seen one of those before." "Gosh Mummy! There's one of those rough chaps from the council estate trying to shin over our garden wall!" If Boris was representing Britain, you'd think that social attitudes hadn't moved on since the 1950s.

As for the Scottish Tories - not that there's many of them - even the hunting, shooting, fishing types who manage to get elected in rural backwaters can see that Boris is a blundering liability, primed like a water pump to destroy Annabel Goldie's best efforts to present an acceptable face of Scottish Conservatism. She must be praying that he remains tied up in London, as far away from Scotland as possible.

That's not to say that Boris could not find a small niche for himself north of the border. Rotarians might offer him the odd post-prandial blabbing slot to keep everyone awake. And he'll always have the barber's vote everywhere, because one look at Boris, and every man is reminded that it's time for a haircut.

When I heard that Boris was standing for mayor of London, I took it as a sign that the Tories had abandoned all hope of defeating Ken Livingstone. "Let's not waste time getting beaten. Let's just send in Boris and keep everyone entertained instead" - that sort of thinking. Now it seems that the Ken v Boris stand-off is on a knife-edge. An apparent buffoon who only ever organised a magazine - and made a shambles of that - stands a serious chance of running the world's most diverse and sophisticated capital.

His minders keep him on a short leash, for fear that Boris's shallow grasp of the myriad complex issues that the mayor has to deal with will show through. He plays to the gallery, promising to scrap bendy buses and phase lights so that traffic moves faster. Next thing we know, it'll be "Collect a free Dinky toy when you vote for me." Boris isn't even undergraduate level. A bright kid from a secondary school debating society could match him on the policy front.

I have bones to pick with Ken; his unswerving support for Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, and Andy Hayman, its Head of Counter-Terrorism - in the wake of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes - and his taste for towering temples to corporate greed. But under Ken, London works better than it ever used to. The congestion charge had an instant effect. Nowadays I routinely take the bus around London, something I never previously considered. There are lots of them since Ken upped their numbers, and they move surprisingly fast.

Yes, sometimes London is hell, but that's what you must expect of international capitals swollen beyond their infrastructural limits. And if you think it's bad under Ken, just watch it descend into chaos when Boris and his home counties chums realise that it isn't like running the village fete. He'll discover, too, that policing London is a whole lot trickier than setting up a neighbourhood-watch scheme.

Where does the pro-Boris momentum come from? As the incumbent, Ken suffers from the Clinton effect, people fancy a change. It's fair enough being anti-Ken, but not if that lets a ludicrous chancer such as Boris get in. Pity poor Londoners come the first of May if Boris actually pulls off this stunt. Still, they can always move to Scotland.