BORIS Johnson seems to have a particular problem keeping lawyer politicians in his government. I dare say that most Herald readers will not have heard of Lord Wolfson before last week, when he became the first and, so far, the only one of Mr Johnson’s ministers to resign over the prime minister being handed a police fine for breaking lockdown rules.

DAVID Wolfson QC was elevated to the House of Lords in January 2021 in order to serve as a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice – it is that position from which he resigned last week. His resignation letter is a model of elegance and principle, as one would expect from a QC. You can read it online – Lord Wolfson posted it on his twitter account.

In it, Lord Wolfson makes clear that he is resigning from government because of his commitment to the rule of law – a commitment which, he states, the government does not appear to share. This is not the first time this has happened of late.

When Lord Keen resigned from Mr Johnson’s government (as Advocate General for Scotland) in September 2020 he did so because he could not reconcile the government’s policy intentions over the application of the UK’s internal market rules to Northern Ireland compatibly with the UK’s international legal obligations.

For him, as for Lord Wolfson, his commitment to the rule of law trumped his political loyalty to party and prime minister. Likewise for Sir Jonathan Jones QC, who resigned in 2020 as head of the Government Legal Service over the same matter that prompted Lord Keen’s departure from government.

What is going on here? On one level, it would be easy to dismiss as irrelevant and inconsequential the resignations of three uber-privileged middle-aged white men, who have lucrative legal careers to fall back on, none of whom are exactly front-line politicians, still less household names.

Easy, but mistaken. For what binds each of these resignations together is the old idea of the rule of law – a principle as compelling and vital in the modern age as it is venerable and august. It means simply that the government must act compatibly with, and not contrary to, the law. If the government – its ministers or its officials or, even more so, its prime minister – attempts to break or avoid or negate the law, it is acting not only illegally but contrary to the very idea of the rule of law.

That very idea is that we are, in the end, not governed by men and women, with all the whims and foibles and flaws that come inevitably with human character, but that we are governed by laws. When a government asserts that the laws do not apply to it – that the government is somehow above the law – it is no ordinary law-breaker, for such an assertion offends not only the law itself, but our very idea of constitutional government.

This has always been the problem with Boris Johnson. He positively exudes the sense – he wallows in it, he glories in it – that the rules just do not apply to him. Rules are for other people. That may be fine in a clown or a fool (every Shakespearean court had one) but not in a ruler. Once Mr Johnson reached high office the Falstaff in him should have been banished, permanently and mercilessly (just as the old soak was, once Hal succeeded his father and became King Henry V).

Boris Johnson, a great Shakespeare enthusiast, knows this well. But he has resolutely failed to act on it. Instead, he has presided over a culture in Downing Street that paid little heed to the lockdown rules the rest of us were struggling under and then – worse, in my view – sought to prevaricate, dodge, duck and dive when the evidence started to emerge. Lord Wolfson cuts to the chase in his resignation letter, when he states that “it would be inconsistent with the rule of law for that conduct to pass with constitutional impunity”. Quite so.

Men and women of principle can see this, whether they happen to be lawyers or not. Consider Munira Mirza’s resignation from Downing Street, where she had been one of Mr Johnson’s longest-serving and closest advisers. She could not stomach the prime minister’s scurrilous allegation that Keir Starmer was somehow responsible for the Crown’s failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile for child sex abuse.

Which leads us, by the unhappiest of contrasts, to the sorry position the Scottish Conservatives are now in. Having taken the high road of principle earlier in the year, when Douglas Ross led what appeared to be a unanimous group of Tory MSPs in calling for the prime minister’s resignation, he and his forlorn troops have now reduced themselves – and made their former position of principle look not only empty but risible – by insisting that the prime minister is now somehow fit for office and that being fined by the police makes no difference.

I expect that the popular verdict on this pantomime of a performance will be every bit as withering as it deserves to be. There are some good, talented and principled men and women in the Scottish Conservative party but, yet again, the vehicle in which they insist on remaining is leading them badly astray. All Anas Sarwar has to do from here is to sit still and watch as Scottish Labour overtakes the Tories as Scotland’s second party and the principal opposition force to the SNP. The Scottish Conservatives are in terminal decline, again. And, this time, it is their own fault.

I fully understand that loyalty is the currency of politics. But there are higher values than loyalty. Fidelity to legal principle is one of them. A rule-breaking government cannot be supported. And a rule-breaking prime minister is no ruler. He is a fool and a clown, and he must be shown the door.

Adam Tomkins is the John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He was a Conservative MSP for the Glasgow region from 2016 to 2021.