TO state the blindingly obvious, Boris Johnson is not an off-the-shelf Prime Minister. He will not go down in history as a run-of-the-mill leader; a May, Cameron, Major or Heath. He is, already, more notable, perhaps even infamous, than that. And he likes it. He doesn’t want to be like them. He wants to be remembered. He wants to be Thatcher, not Cameron; Churchill, not Heath.

He may yet be. Whether you like him or not – and this column will not preoccupy itself with that – Boris Johnson has inherited, some would say, created, the political environment to be remembered for hundreds of years to come. Mr Churchill had the environment of war. Mrs Thatcher had the environment of economic ruin. Mr Johnson has the environment of Brexit and Scottish independence. It is arguably as significant as those of his two most notable predecessors; the future of a 300-year-old state.

And you don’t need to be a fan of Mr Johnson to recognise that he possesses the characteristics and abilities to make the most of his time in office. The most important of these characteristics is optimism. In politics, as in life, pessimists are rarely successful. Mr Johnson’s sunny optimism has already taken him far. A pessimistic Tory would not have won two terms as mayor of an urban Labour city like London. A pessimistic Tory would not have plumped for the side which was significantly behind in the polls ahead of the Brexit referendum, thinking he could lead it to victory. A pessimistic Tory would not have cajoled and strained the constitution, his party and the people around him in a desperate effort to force a general election which he might well have have lost, and which if he had would have rendered him the shortest-serving Prime Minister in the memory of anyone alive today.

Many of life’s optimists carry with them an associated fix – gambling. Their glass is half full, but that’s not enough; they want it to overflow. Mr Johnson also fits this category to perfection. The General Election, in particular, showed this. Calling that election was the equivalent of Mr Johnson going ‘all in’ at poker. He gambled. He won.

What does Mr Johnson do with this quality? Having, it must be said, stuck two fingers up to those who said he would never get a new deal from Brussels, who said he couldn’t circumvent the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, who said he would never break the red wall, what’s the next bet?

Scotland.

With Brexit done, to quote a successful campaign slogan, there is an instant realisation amongst Team Boris, the Conservative Party and the media in London that Mr Johnson’s first term is likely to be dominated by Scotland, as Brexit and the EU free trade agreement fizzle away in the background.

Scotland’s restlessness is not Mr Johnson’s fault, but it is his responsibility. Whether he likes it or not, Scotland and the UK’s constitutional future is overwhelmingly likely to be decided on his watch. He will be the Prime Minister who loses Scotland, or he will be the Prime Minister who puts nationalism in its box, effectively forever.

However he does not have long to decide how to play his hand. The Scottish Parliament election at which this will be the single issue will be, by the time we all return from the Christmas break, little over a year away.

Unlike his colleagues in the Scottish Tory party, or indeed those who went before him in Downing Street, he is unencumbered by orthodox thinking. The Scottish Tories have become utterly paranoid by the very thought of another independence referendum. Indyref 2 is the Scottish Tories’ bogeyman, dressed in black on a badly lit street at midnight, stalking the party and making it live in perpetual fear.

As we saw in the General Election, it has driven the party to a polar position whereby almost all they ever talk about is indyref 2. Even when they are trying to talk about something else, like the state of our schools, they end up talking about indyref 2: ‘Nicola Sturgeon is too busy pushing for another independence referendum to pay attention to our failing schools’ etc. Like all strategies, it’s good when it works, but the trouble is that two Thursdays ago it didn’t work.

This one-dimensional approach has had the curious consequence of weakening the faith of the Scottish Tory party in the Union itself. They have become so institutionally obsessed with the holding of a second referendum being sacrilegious that they appear to have lost all confidence in being able to win the thing.

It is in this approach where, perhaps, we may just find Mr Johnson and the team around him raising eyebrows. The Scottish Tories’ paranoid pessimism is about as far removed from Mr Johnson’s default optimism as it is possible to be.

So, what does the optimistic Unionist do? Well, perhaps he calls the SNP’s bluff. Perhaps he reads the environment in Scotland and thinks he can win a referendum, ending this argument for, as we saw in Quebec, that is what another defeat would do. Perhaps he looks at the SNP’s policy of re-entering the European Union and sees an open goal opportunity to warn of the risk of a customs border from Gretna to Berwick. There’s no equivalent of the Irish Sea to bury that border in, he may think.

The optimistic Unionist may think, after already having said No in an independence referendum, and then having witnessed the extreme difficulties and uncertainty inflicted on Scotland by Brexit, that the Scottish people may stick with the devil they know.

But most of all, the optimistic Unionist may see that the union has been placed in danger not by Brexit, as people lazily assume, but by asymmetric and insufficient devolution over the last 20 years. He may realise that Britain remains heavily centralised; that Scotland has always wanted ‘something in the middle’ far more than it has wanted either the status quo or independence; that his new voters in the north of England have been disempowered by devolution and have no outlet with which to legitimately express their Englishness.

The optimistic Unionist may rate his chances not just of beating Scottish nationalism, preventing any surge in Welsh nationalism, and pulling the wandering eyes of the Ulstermen back east and away from the south, but of reshaping the UK forever, offering true home rule to the nations and perhaps even creating a bespoke solution for his former fiefdom in London.

The Tories have never asked themselves the question: “What does the SNP not want us to do?”. If they did, they may hear this answer: “Hold a second independence referendum in May 2020”.

Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters