ALL we ever get these days is bad news from Westminster. It makes you nostalgic for the days when the worst thing on a news report was that there was horsemeat in supermarket lasagne. UK politics went from bad to worse some time back, and is now plunging its way through the frozen floor of the lowest level of hell, the one that Dante said was reserved for telemarketers and Simon Cowell. Theresa May is the new Prime Minister of the UK.

By virtue of being the Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May is therefore also the Prime Minister of Scotland, despite the fact that Fluffy Mundell was the only person in the entire country who voted for her. She was hailed by the Conservative party as the country’s best hope, but that’s only if you’re hoping for authoritarian xenophobic reactionary right-wing austerity on steroids. That’s the Theresa May who said last year that the prospect of the SNP having any influence on the UK Government would provoke the biggest crisis since the abdication.

Now Britain is in the middle of the biggest crisis since the abdication, caused entirely by Mrs May’s Tory colleagues, and she’s only becoming PM because the ones responsible for the crisis have abdicated. None of the prominent Brexiteers are left standing. Except Liam Fox, who is still hoping that he’ll get a place in May’s cabinet as Minister of State for Adam Werritty. As the country came to the realisation that May was going to become Prime Minister, she said that she wanted to build a country that works for everyone, although she didn’t explain why she’s spent her entire time in Westminster voting for legislation that does the exact opposite. Possibly, and I am not making this up, it’s because she’s got a cat.

This Prime Minister, with the support of no-one in the country who isn’t actually a stuffed toy, is going to take Scotland out of the EU even though Scots voted by a very large majority to retain our EU membership, and despite the fact that we were told by Ms May’s chums not two years ago that the only way we could ensure our EU membership was by voting to remain a part of the UK. That’s how democracy works in the UK. You get more of a choice in voting for Big Brother contestants than you do for the Prime Minister or whether Scotland is a part of the EU or not.

Not-Mother Theresa’s coronation as PM came after her opponent Mother Andrea Leadsom decided that maybe she’d be better off honing her parenting skills with under-fives as it turned out that Tory MPs were too immature for her after all. Instead of a Conservative Party election, we’re getting a Conservative coronation instead, only without any bunting or street parties. Mind you, it’s also a coronation where we don’t have to suffer Nicholas Witchell’s wittering royalist sycophancy, so it’s not all bad. We just have the wittering sycophancy of the Tory press instead.

“Brexit means Brexit”, said Theresa in her first address to the press. She’s not disposed to compromise on the freedom of movement, and she boasted that the EU is going to discover that she’s a difficult woman. She can be as difficult as she likes, but the truth of the matter is that the UK is in a very weak position. Difficult or not, she’s not going to dictate the terms of the Brexit. It will be the EU that does that.

Our new kitten-heeled ruler has promised to deliver “a better Britain”, but it won’t be a better Britain for the poor, and it certainly won’t be better for the working-class voters who were seduced by the Brexit message. Free from the constraints imposed by the EU and the European Human Rights legislation, Britain is going to be a cold, unwelcoming and hard place. The only freedoms will be the freedom of business to exploit, the freedom to privatise, and the freedom of the state to snoop and spy. And it will all be dressed up in red, white and blue bunting with patriotic parades and cooing at royal babies.

Somewhere on her very long list of problems to address, May is going to have to address her Scottish problem. All Tory PMs have a Scottish problem, on account of the fact that over large tracts of the country the word Tory is understood as a term of abuse, however Theresa May has a very particular Scottish problem. This is because not only is Tory still a term of abuse over much of the country, but the country has just voted to remain a part of the EU by a very considerable margin, a margin far larger than the margin by which it voted to remain a part of the UK two years ago. Now all the promises made by the Better Together campaign lie in the dust along with the Brexiteers’ career prospects, and opinion polls show that there’s no longer a 55 per cent pro-Union majority whose wishes must be respected.

Worse than that, at least for Theresa, is that Scotland has a government which was elected with a clear mandate to hold another independence referendum if there was a material change in circumstances. Theresa can stamp her leopard-print shoes all she likes, but there’s not much she can do to stop Scotland sailing off into the European distance. It’s not just Theresa who can be a difficult woman. The Scottish Government can withhold legislative consent to those parts of Brexit that are devolved responsibilities. We could be difficult in other ways too. The EU might not look too kindly on a Westminster which was seeking Brexit compromises while it attempted to block Scotland’s attempts to remain a part of the EU. In any event, Westminster refusing to allow a referendum is the guaranteed way of ensuring that Scotland will vote for independence. Theresa is going to discover Scotland is full of difficult women and men.