Captain Foresight
Entirely out of character, Boris Johnson's parliamentary encounters with the SNP showed restraint and discipline. His eventual successor should pay heed.
TODAY, Boris Johnson makes his final outing at Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s an occasion to reflect on one thing he got absolutely right. Every week, on a Wednesday lunchtime, Mr Johnson has come face to face with the grievance-hunting antics of SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford. Week after week, Mr Johnson has shown exactly how to handle his dire and dreary politics. With the candidates to replace him as Prime Minister eager to set out a fresh start, we may be in for a very different style of statecraft at No10 come the autumn. But given the manner in which Mr Johnson has so comprehensively out-manoeuvred the SNP’s pontificator-in-chief over the last few months, the Prime Minister’s eventual successor would do well to take notes and copy at least this part of his resume.
Mr Blackford’s approach to Mr Johnson in the Commons over the last three years have consistently followed the same pattern; the SNP Westminster leader is nothing if not predictable. Mounting his small hillock of sanctimony, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber reads out a sermon on the moral failings of Mr Johnson’s character before claiming, on behalf of the Scottish nation, that those of us who live above Hadrian’s Wall will not stand for it. It is utterly excruciating. But Mr Blackford’s oratory serves a plan. He hopes that by whipping up the Conservatives opposite into a fury, he can goad Mr Johnson into saying something characteristically ludicrous. In an ideal world, he hopes then to be drowned out by a chorus of English hyarr-hyarrs. These are the tactics to which modern Scottish nationalism has stooped. Mr Blackford is utterly shameless in this regard; one Conservative figure told me recently about a quiet session in parliament which came to life when Mr Blackford pointed opposite to insist ‘they cannot shut Scotland up’, despite the fact nobody had been paying him any attention at all. It didn’t matter: the social media clip was on its way.
Mr Johnson is not a man who normally shuns the offer of a bait. Any bait. And as the Prime Minister who last week called the Leader of the Opposition “Captain Crasharoonie Snoozefest” the mind boggles at the kind of phrase that he has probably dreamed up to use against Mr Blackford (Jock McGrievance? Rab C Moanalot?). It is the stuff of SNP social media dreams. Remarkably, however, a well-advised Mr Johnson has played against character when it comes to the SNP these last few months. He has shown a unusual degree of restraint. Indeed, in his exchanges with Mr Blackford, he has done the one thing guaranteed to enrage the SNP and infuriate his nationalist colleagues more than anything: he has been revoltingly reasonable. Even charming. It has become highly amusing. The other week, as Mr Blackford moralised once more about the Prime Minister’s many failings, the Prime Minister countered his points calmly before noting to the chamber that “behind the scenes, we (he and Mr Blackford) actually get on quite well.” Ouch. With devastating blows to Mr Blackford’s Nationalist credentials like this, it’s no wonder his tenure as leader of the SNP’s Westminster group is on a shoogly peg.
As I say, I hope Mr Johnson’s successors are taking note. What they need to understand, and what Mr Johnson appeared to grasp eventually, is that the Blackford-Sturgeon brand of permagrievance only really works when England – and specifically a particular type of entitled, upper-class Englishness, as personified by Mr Johnson - plays to type. The Independence Cause as promulgated by the current SNP leadership is not sustained by anything resembling a thought-through plan. Instead, to gain velocity, it relies upon frequent fill-ups of high-grade Anglo-Saxon foolishness and insensitivity.
I think back to Ms Sturgeon’s recollection of the night of the Independence Referendum, back in 2014. She and her then mentor Alex Salmond got together in the Dynamic Earth building in Edinburgh to watch the results come in. It was soon clear they had lost. “We all, with the exception of Alex, burst into tears,” Ms Sturgeon reflected a few years later. The SNP was contemplating the death of the dream. Then David Cameron – remember him? - rang up. The then Prime Minister was calling to let the defeated First Minister know that, in his victory statement in the coming hours, he would not be setting out a message of unity and goodwill to all across the UK. No, instead, with Scotland having had quite enough attention for one year, he was setting out that England now needed to have its say, via the introduction of English votes for English laws. It was an appalling decision. In Edinburgh, Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon were elated. “The crying stopped,” Ms Sturgeon recalled. They realised, in her words, “this is not over.” The campaign for independence had had its infusion of English crassness, breathing life back into a cause which, without it, would have withered there and then.
During Prime Minister’s Questions, at least, Mr Johnson appears to have recognised that denying the SNP its customary fill-up of Westminster idiocy is half of the battle won (though, demob happy, he will doubtless prove me wrong today). The SNP wants nothing more than to be told get back into its box, all the better to make Scots feel boxed in themselves. But, to use a martial arts metaphor, Mr Johnson has seen that it is Judo, where you use the weight of your opponent against them, not Karate, where you try to whack them head on, which produces the better results. It denies the SNP the fight of their choice. It also puts the focus on their own proposals – which are, putting it mildly, somewhat lacking. I was on holiday last week when the First Minister produced her latest paper on independence but it isn’t only those who were abroad who may not have noticed it. As noted by Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University, one of the leading authorities on the SNP of the last thirty years, it was “dismal, negative, and uninspiring”. With feedback like that, no wonder Mr Blackford and Ms Sturgeon see the need to pick a fight in London.
Prime Minister’s Questions is not hugely important, of course. Few people actually watch it. But it sets the tone. And as they prepare for their final session today, there are two observations I draw from the story of Mr Johnson’s exchanges with Mr Blackford.
Firstly, had the Prime Minister displayed the same discipline and restraint as he showed in his dealings with Mr Blackford to the job more generally, he might still be looking forward to a third term in office. He didn’t and now he is out on his ear. For the Prime Minister, it is a case of what might have been.
And secondly, the encounters have shown that when the SNP is denied the target of their choice, when they are forced to swing and miss, the paper-thin fragility of their political argument is exposed for all to see. Take away the bogeyman, and what is there?
Mr Johnson will pay for his failings with his job. Mr Blackford – still clinging on despite his evident shortcomings and the cack-handed way in which he handled the Patrick Grady sex pest scandal – clings on. It shouldn’t hold. If the SNP wants to show it has an plan beyond its uninspiring and negative grievance politics, then it isn’t just Mr Johnson who should depart the front bench today, it is Mr Blackford too.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 20th July 2022