The National:

WITH the Scottish Tory conference taking place online this weekend, the last thing they would have wanted was Boris Johnson putting his foot in it on a matter linked to the Union.

Unfortunately for Tories north of the Border that’s exactly what happened this week.

News outlets across the UK picked up on Johnson’s claim that devolution was a “disaster” and Tony Blair’s “biggest mistake”.

The party’s efforts to row back on the claims have been interesting to say the least. “No, it’s the SNP who are bad,” they cry out to the very people who have been electing the SNP to run Holyrood since 2007.

READ MORE: Question Time: Ian Blackford dismantles Fraser Nelson's SNP-Bad claims

Maybe the real problem with devolution is us Scots just can’t be trusted to elect the Tories to our Parliament. It’s a tragedy.

A good chunk of Scottish Tories opted to stay out of the whole mess this week, with reports many were furious with the Prime Minister’s choice of language.

Others, however, leapt to Johnson’s defence.

Here’s who did, and how they tried to clean up the mess left behind by the Minister for the Union (lol.)

MPs

  • John Lamont (November 16): “Nicola - the threat to devolution is not the Prime Minister but the SNP. The SNP want to scrap devolution by taking Scotland out of the UK. Independence will finish devolution.” [Retweeted by MSP Annie Wells]
  • Douglas Ross (November 16): "Devolution has not been a disaster. The SNP’s non-stop obsession with another referendum - above jobs, schools and everything else - has been a disaster." (Retweeted by MSP and former leader Ruth Davidson)
  • Andrew Bowie
    - (November 17): "The only party that wants to rip up the existing settlement and end devolution are the SNP. That's the truth of it. We want to make it work. That's why we need an end to nationalist grievance mongering in Holyrood and, instead, a focus on the real issues."
    - (November 18): "Ian Blackford demonstrating that the only threat to devolution is the SNP." / “The only threat to devolution is the SNP.”

MSPs

  • Adam Tomkins (November 16): "Has devolution been a success? For the Scottish economy? No. For Scottish education? No. For tackling Scottish drug deaths? No. But the answer is not to attack devolution. It’s to attack those who’ve been running it—the SNP."
  • Dean Lockhart (November 16): "It’s not devolution which has been a disaster. It has been the SNP’s constant attempts over the last 14 years to weaponise devolution to push their separatist agenda which has been a disaster for Scotland’s public services."
  • Rachael Hamilton (November 16): "Distastefully prioritising independence over a pandemic is pretty irresponsible. These political games are a handy distraction from the SNP’s failure to make a success of devolution. It’s the SNP who are a threat to Scotland not the PM."
  • Oliver Mundell (November 18): This entire BBC Good Morning Scotland car-crash interview.

It’s pretty clear that Johnson is driving support for independence – we’ve all seen the countless polls into the matter.

The standard SNP-Bad lines simply won’t work when we know that the Scottish public is happier with Holyrood’s handling of most issues than they are with Westminster’s.

The Union is gone. Everyone can see it. Independence support just keeps going up.

The only disaster is the UK Government.