DOES Nicola Sturgeon have a secret operative embedded at Number 10? Is it Dominic Cummings?

You have to wonder. Since Scotland’s highest civil court ruled that Boris Johnson was a law-breaker and, by implication, dishonest, Government sources have responded by attacking Scottish judges.

Just carry on like this, guys, the First Minister must be thinking to herself, and I’ll soon get that settled pro-independence majority I’ve been chasing without luck for the past five years.

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Because while Government figures busily undermined trust in the judiciary, apparently to shore up their predominantly English and Welsh base, they seemed to regard Scottish public opinion as collateral damage.

And this says only one thing: Boris Johnson’s government has given up on winning over Scotland. Nothing says “Scotland’s lost to us” like accusing three of Her Majesty’s bewigged judges of bias, just because they’re Scottish.

This burst of antipathy towards Scottish institutions will have an impact, both on Scottish Tory votes and on independence.

But it has another significance as well. This abandonment of restraint, coupled with the sclerosis gripping Westminster, casts Holyrood in a very good light.

The Scottish Parliament is already a symbol of hope for some alarmed English voters, and that has implications for the future of the UK’s entire system of government.

Perhaps we should give Mr Johnson the benefit of the doubt. After all, he is now on record praising the impartiality of British judges. Doesn’t that show that it was all just a terrible misunderstanding? Well, it might have helped if he hadn’t waited until Thursday to say it. That left plenty of time for others to foment discontent in the supposed Remainer establishment.

At first, it looked like it might have been a cock-up. “The legal activists chose the Scottish courts for a reason,” a Number 10 source told The Sun shortly after the ruling. Whoa there, was the reaction of a startled press corps. Trying to impugn the impartiality of judges is a ploy lifted straight out of Dictatorship for Dummies. Perhaps a graduate trainee had answered the press office phone.

But no. In spite of efforts by the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland to row back on the remarks, Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng later went in front of the cameras to suggest all over again that the judges were biased. Or rather, he implied it in the most contrived way possible, insisting that “I’m not saying this” but that “many people” were.

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Well, what else should we expect from this feckless, morally vacuous regime? It lied about the Yellowhammer documents that it has now been forced to publish, claiming they were out of date when they were current. It unlawfully suspended parliament to avoid scrutiny of its Brexit plans. The Prime Minister stands accused by a court of misleading the Queen and ministers are now refusing to comply with parliament’s order to release messages relating to its decision to suspend parliament (now why on earth would that be). Can MPs hold it to account? No they cannot… because parliament is prorogued.

What an extraordinary paragraph to write about a British Government.

Public trust in politicians was so low even before the Brexit fiasco that voters expect no better than this, and that is what the Cummings strategy relies upon. We are frogs on the boil. Had attacking the judiciary seemed new and shocking, we would have leapt more readily to decry it, but the most shocking aspect of this Government’s contempt for the rules is that it already seems so ordinary.

But by contrast, the upstart, evolving, work-in-progress that is the Scottish Parliament looks like a bastion of stability, consensus and lawfulness. How many Scots, I wonder, have offered silent thanks in recent weeks for living here; how many English voters have looked longingly across the Border?

And why should they not? It isn’t fashionable to praise politicians, and God knows, Scotland has been gravely divided ever since the independence referendum of 2014, an event that unleashed some ugly forces on society.

But Scotland has a functioning parliament representing a diverse range of opinions, and suddenly seems so much more precious because of it. The Scottish Parliament has not escaped the divisions of Brexit and the pace of business over recent years has lacked ambition, but it still deserves to be called a progressive institution. Inequality is a shared concern; so is tackling climate change and Scotland’s health record. The moderate nature of Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives has meant that at Holyrood consensus has often been found just left of centre. The electoral system is imperfect but far more proportional than the joke version perpetuated at Westminster, in which it took half a million votes to elect one Green MP in 2017 and less than 43,000 to elect each Tory. Nicola Sturgeon is often attacked by left-wingers for being cautious, but MPs at Westminster can only dream of a centrist figure who abides by the rule of law and takes decisions after considering the consequences.

This is no elegy to Scotland. Aggressive, partisan politics still plague it. Implacable enmity across party lines over independence has eaten away at the potential for further consensus. But it is a functioning, multi-party democracy, which is a great deal more than can be said for the great decaying “mother-of-parliaments” in London.

Wholesale change is required and we can only hope that this crisis will elevate that need from a geeky fetish into a national priority. Amber Rudd is calling for electoral reform, which has to be priority number one. The old notion that first-past-the-post produces strong government has been comprehensively trashed. Only a more proportional form of government can end voters’ dangerous feeling of helplessness. The House of Lords must be abolished and replaced with an elected second chamber. And the emerging appetite for regional assemblies in some parts of England, which could foreshadow full federalism, should be encouraged.

Stable government is precious – and precarious. Scots too should take lessons from the chaos at Westminster. This current guddle has not happened in a vacuum, but against a background of polarisation, intransigence and intolerance, which could all too easily engulf Scotland in the run-up to another independence referendum.

Restraint, probity, thoughtfulness: they might seem very last century, but the only country worth living in is one that holds these qualities dear.