DO you remember Rorymania? It seems so long ago already. The online buzz, the sweaty bookies who quoted 100-1 on the International Development Secretary, the triumph of the Channel 4 debate last Sunday, the chaos of the BBC one on Tuesday, and Mr Stewart kicked to the kerb on Wednesday. That’s politics. Up like a rocket, down like a stick.

It was fun while it lasted. But it was a mania, and all manias are brief and slightly silly. What did we actually know about Rory Stewart? Principally that he didn’t look or sound like the other lot. He didn’t come across as a greasy, self-seeking weasel. Nor did he look like Theresa May. There was a pulse, for one thing. A personality. A hinterland even.

But other than being refreshingly blunt about Brexit for a Tory, we didn’t know much. His big policy was not to have policies. No tax cuts, no spending pledges. He was, in effect, continuity austerity. If that had sunk in, the chatterati adoration might have waned.

He was no miracle cure for our political malaise, but a symptom of it, a sign of how much people are yearning for an alternative to what they’re being offered. That eagerness to believe in him, in the absence of facts, should have sounded an alarm, not a hosanna.

It may be Mr Stewart, for all his apparent guilelessness, is only a smarter sort of self-seeking weasel.

Yet he will be missed. When he was in the Tory leadership race, he was a brake on the worst impulses of the other candidates, constantly nagging them over how they might deliver Brexit by October 31, and that the EU sees the threat of the UK leaving without a deal as no threat at all. Do we really want to join Venezuela and Syria and trade on WTO terms?

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. The former foreign secretary isn’t a lock for Downing Street. His well-chronicled flaws mean he could easily stumble over the next month of party hustings and offer Jeremy Hunt a chance to strike. But as things stand, he is very likely to be the next Prime Minister.

This is bad for Ruth Davidson, but possibly not as much as she fears, and good for Nicola Sturgeon, but possibly not as much as she hopes.

The Scottish Tory leader’s discomfort over her old enemy could hardly have been clearer this week. First she backed Sajid Javid against Mr Johnson. Then she backed Michael Gove against him. If the empty lectern from the Channel 4 debate had been running, she’d clearly have been happy to back that too.

Asked by STV news on Thursday whether she was backing “anyone but Boris”, she couldn’t even mention his name. She and other senior Scottish Tories worry Mr Johnson will prove anathema to Scottish voters.

He has already providing the SNP with some choice ammo. His journalistic career is full of sniping at Scotland and the Scots. He didn’t really argue in 2005 that a native Scot could never be PM, only an MP with a Scottish constituency, given the West Lothian Question.

At the time, Tony Blair, a Scot, was standing for re-election. Mr Johnson, born in New York, didn’t attack Mr Blair. He attacked his expected successor, Gordon Brown, as he had a Scottish seat.

But the comments were enough for Ms Sturgeon to get her teeth into this week. He has also been very rude about the FM personally, and she about him.

So what are the Scottish Tories to do if he wins? In recent weeks there has been a conversation at the top of the party about how to handle the Boris problem.

Should they cold-shoulder him, or coach him in the esoteric ways of Scottish politics and hold his hand through the constitutional minefield?

It’s a bogus debate, a flattering delusion that suggests they have a choice. Ms Davidson and her party cannot distance themselves from a Johnson premiership because by extension they would be backing away from the Westminster system and the Union. That hardly fits with Ms Davidson’s brand.

So rather than fuel the SNP claim that Westminster is now so alien it’s only sensible to leave, the Scottish Tories can only embrace Prime Minister Johnson.

The manic grin of Borista MP Ross Thomson aside, they may well do it through gritted teeth, their skin crawling, but there’s really no option. We’ve had hug a hoodie, now it’s time to cuddle a clown. For good or ill, if Mr Johnson wins this contest, Ms Davidson is shackled to the great lummox.

How bad might a Johnson premiership be? Pretty woeful, it’s fair to guess. He seems guided by neither plans nor principles. He may survive a while through a lizard-brain instinct for self-preservation, tacking to the centre ground to align with the protective mass of voters. He has already started to squirm out of his Hallowe’en-or-bust position by saying Brexit by then is “eminently feasible” rather than nailed down. But the MPs who backed him because of his apparent Brexit hardline are not the compromising sort. He will soon come up against the same Commons arithmetic and red-faced irreconcilables who did for Mrs May.

He may not last long enough to do Ms Davidson serious harm.

Ms Sturgeon, meanwhile, is hoping he will be a long-term incompetent, ruffling feathers and setting teeth on edge every time he even mentions Scotland. She said yesterday he would be a “disaster” for the UK and Scotland. “It further demonstrates that Scotland and the rest of the UK are on different political trajectories,” she told the Herald.

But that’s more standard wishful thinking. All things Tory are supposed to move the dial on independence. Just like Brexit. But if all the things the SNP says are boosting independence were actually boosting independence, Yes would be nudging 100 per cent in the polls. “It has got to the stage where if the chicken crosses the road, it will be a boost for Scottish independence,” David Mundell said in the Commons this week. Even SNP MPs smiled at that one.

So Ms Sturgeon should not mistake her personal needle with Mr Johnson for a looming national backlash. Yes, Scottish voters have a low opinion of Mr Johnson. But they also know he is likely to have a short and inglorious shelf-life before a revival of Rorymania. And who knows what might happen then?