IN recent years Scotland has hardly been a stranger to political division. Long before falling out with your neighbour over a referendum became fashionable in the rest of the UK, we were already old hands at it. Despite the rancour of the past, there is at least one point on which every Scot of sound mind can agree: Boris Johnson gives us the collective pip.
The sickening whiff of entitlement and elitism. The towering incompetence. The faux bonhomie. The Big Ben-sized exclamation mark over his character in general. No thanks to any of it.
No wonder Scotland’s First Minister was looking so chipper yesterday. Certainly there were the European election results to smile about, and the publication of her twice in a generation referendum bill.
But for the foreseeable future every day that Boris is around is a good day for the FM. The former Bullingdon Club member is the gift to independence who keeps on giving. With him in Downing Street England will look even more like a foreign country where they do things differently.
Then again, it might be a Scot who becomes PM. While the race for the Tory leadership could give the starting crowds at the London Marathon a run for their money, a notable addition to the fray this week was one Michael Gove.
If you had to create a character least likely to be found as a Tory PM it would surely be the current Environment Secretary. Even Dickens might have thought the Gove story a trifle over the top. Abandoned as a baby and adopted at four months old by an Aberdeen fishmonger, he was educated at a state school before winning a scholarship, going private, and from there heading to Oxford. He took up a proper trade, if you count journalism as such, which we do in these parts, and became very successful at it.
Moving on to politics, he has held major offices, education, justice, the environment, and in each pursued relatively radical policies that take on established interests.
If all that is not enough, he wants to wipe out puppy farms. In dog-loving Britain that is catnip indeed. Oh, and he has a spouse who has endless access to the pages of a national newspaper. That sort of thing can come in very handy when a chap has a leadership campaign on the go.
Gove: I have conviction to be PM
How much it benefits him remains to be seen. Yesterday, three days after his announcement, Sarah Vine finally confirmed her other half was running for PM. In summing him up, she was her usual chatty self. “Like all husbands, Michael has his flaws: a fondness for corduroy, an inability to go anywhere (including dinner) without a book, a passion for Wagnerian opera, an obsession with Strictly, an entirely irrational dislike of houseplants and, of course, the usual pathological male inability to operate a dishwasher.” The Wagner aside, he seems a pretty straight sort of guy, does he not?
Then again, so did Tony Blair, who coined the “pretty straight sort of guy” phrase in 1997 when his government was up to its neck in accusations it had exempted Formula One from a tobacco ad ban in return for a donation.
The jaunty tone of Ms Vine’s column yesterday was in contrast to an email she wrote to her husband, and accidentally sent to a stranger, during the 2016 Tory leadership fight. Ahead of a meeting between Mr Johnson and Mr Gove, she urged her spouse to extract a specific guarantee about a top job in return for his support, telling him: “The details can be worked out later on, but without that you have no leverage. From My Weekly to Lady Macbeth, just like that.
We know how the 2016 tale turned out, with Mr Gove knifing Johnson in the front and deciding to stand himself. That Mr Gove recovered from that very public assassination of a colleague is testament to his skill as a politician and his resilience. He will need plenty of the latter if he does become PM.
His candidacy in 2016 was a surprise because whenever he he had been asked about the job previously he waved away the notion with a smile. All politicians do. In an interview with the FT in 2014, when he was a Minister in David Cameron’s cabinet, he went further. “I don’t have what it takes,” he said candidly. “I have seen David close up on a variety of occasions – he just has an equanimity and a stamina, a sense of calm, good judgment.”
The piece portrays him, highly accurately as it turned out, as a man in a fearful rush to fulfil his ambitions before a new generation came up behind and pushed him aside.
We all present different faces to the world, our public selves and our private selves. Most people, one hopes, regard themselves as pretty straight sorts who can be trusted to do the right thing. But the point about running for elected office is that it is a way of testing a person’s character and fitness to govern. Yet that is not going to happen here.
As matters stand, a future Prime Minister of the UK only has to pass muster with Tory MPs and 120,000 party members, plus take part in a few televised debates. In short, only an Emily Maitlis eye roll could stand between the chances of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, or anyone else becoming PM. President Xi Jinping of China must be looking on with envy. Yes, it really is that easy to become a Prime Minister in 2019 Britain.
The right thing to do would be to hold a General Election, but no candidate for the Tory leadership would back such a move given the hammering the party suffered in the European elections. So we must endure another contest between the half-good, wholly bad and the outright ugly of the Conservative party. At the very least, the final two contenders should take part in televised debates with the other party leaders, with the FM representing Scotland.
Choosing a PM this way would still be an outrage to democracy that no amount of waffling about unwritten constitutions and parliamentary convention could disguise, but at least it would be a test of the candidates’ mettle. The last contender to duck such a test was Theresa May. Just look how that turned out.
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