Ruth Wishart: Johnson plays to the gallery while Starmer woos and SNP dawdle

In fairness, Johnson excelled himself. Which is to say that in a career littered with dodgy jokes, back to back bluster, and ­vacuity of content you have to say his ­Coventry address was an exemplar of the genre.

When all he had to do was turn up and be the comic turn at Tory conferences it was a bit of a doddle. Tickle some right wing tums with gags about loony lefties and you were pretty well home and dry. His ­shortcomings as a Prime Minister are ­already well rehearsed; to call him a ­workshy ­charlatan barely covers the ­opening case for the prosecution.

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The problem is that the only man who hasn’t cottoned on to the unedifying sight of a mobile ego masquerading as a national leader is the tousled one himself. He’s still stuck in that conference groove, ­mistaking laboured “jokes” for actual policies. He even reprised his loony leftie routine, though that bewhiskered jibe played rather better in the Corbyn era.

A small flavour of last Thursday’s sound and fury, signifying sod all: “Strong ­leadership is the yeast that lifts the whole mattress of dough, the magic sauce, the ketchup of catch-up”.

When even right-wing bloggers scratch their heads and wonder what the hell you’re on about now, a reflective chap might pause for thought. Then again, we’re not talking about a reflective chap, and thinking is not exactly a core skill.

The speech was supposed to be a ­keynote effort putting some overdue flesh on the skeletal bones of his favoured “levelling up” slogan. Instead we got a rehash of old announcements, and a plea to the public to help him out with ideas.

(It’s said that Number 10 talked up the speech when it became clear that if he tried to hold a Downing Street reception for the England team, most of them would be washing their hair. Except for those who plumped for root canal surgery as a more alluring alternative. So pray silence instead for A BIG AND IMPORTANT SPEECH.)

In the event, few squibs have encountered this level of dampness.

We won’t make the poor richer, by making the rich poorer, is the sort of lazy soundbite which betrays not a shred of evidence that he’s bothered to read the ­library’s worth of research on the causes of inequity in everything from life ­expectancy to poverty to lack of basic opportunities. All available these many years to anyone serious about making a difference.

Johnson will have been in office for two years come next weekend and his impact on levelling up people’s lives and ­livelihoods has been on the slender side of negligible. His administration is ­intellectually bankrupt and will be proved ultimately to have been astonishingly and casually corrupt. He’s banking on getting out from under before the threadbare ­nature of his premiership unveils him as a naked emperor to the most shortsighted of voters.

You had to laugh to prevent crying when he talked about getting HS2 to ­Scotland. Remember when there was ­going to be special Scottish bonuses from the ­Channel Tunnel, London ­Crossrail and all the other billions of pounds ­projects? “Scrounging Jocks?”. Do your sums, guys.

Johnson will never qualify as Scotland’s saviour, (for that matter he’ll never be England’s either.) We know he’s even ­hostile to devolution, though, like every other rash pronouncement he made, it took fully two minutes to deny the words which fell from his own lips. What a chancer.

Keir Starmer is cut from a different cloth. Well read, earnest, not at all devoid of decent instincts. Yet the notion that he can rescue Scotland from the actions of this truly immoral Westminster regime is just as risible, albeit for different reasons.

The loss of the Hartlepool by-election was a stark reminder of how many voters in once solid Labour seats in England are still in thrawl to the snake oil salesman in chief. Scraping home in Batley and Spen was a triumph for Jo Cox’s brave ­sister rather than the party machine. (And she had bad penny George Galloway to ­contend with.)

There was already a mountain of Nevis proportions to climb in winning enough Tory held seats to claw back power. When you have trouble hanging on to your own tribesfolk, that task is virtually ­impossible.

Starmer’s summer tour, which began in Blackpool, sees the Labour leader ­meeting up with small groups of ­people whom he needs to woo back to the ­Labour fold. A sort of Love Island for the politically ­engaged – who prefer to keep their clothes on. I imagine he’s quite ­impressive in that setting, but it will take a wheen of ­conversions to make any dent in Labour’s losses.

Besides, we have seen this movie ­before. The speed with which Labour support haemorrhaged in Scotland was dizzying, and the result of the 2015 election pretty well jaw dropping for victors as well as vanquished.

I don’t believe this is a unique ­phenomenon in politics, as witness the near-death experience of the Canadian conservatives. So the SNP would do well to consider the proposition that ­governments who lose their connection to the governed, or fashion different ­priorities from them, can put themselves in real peril.

A fellow columnist last week opined that nothing was more likely to repel ­potential Yes voters than evidence of splits in the indy movement, and he had the polling to prove it.

I don’t doubt that; I’d merely observe that the quickest way to quell ­dissenting voices is to give the Yes troops hard ­evidence that the Scottish Government has a clear plan and a strategy (with a timeline attached) to progress the case for independence. With every week that ­passes, the need to decouple from a ­morally bankrupt Westminster becomes more urgent.

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YESTERDAY SNP president Mike Russell gave a presentation on progress towards another referendum to his party’s NEC. It came on the back of an eight-page booklet, outlining the many reasons why Scotland could not just survive, but thrive as a small European nation blessed with many resources.

It presented detailed arguments on ­everything from pensions to health as to how Scotland fares in comparison with similar sized countries, and outlined the threats posed by continuing to dance to Westminster’s tune.

Like Scotland the Brief, compiled by ­Believe in Scotland/Business for ­Scotland, it provides a useful campaign tool which should be put in as many hands as possible. What concerns me is that every so often it reads as if the FM has insisted on a caveat: “when the immediate public health crisis is over”; “as a simple matter of democracy our right to make that choice – once the current crisis has passed – must be respected”.

In my view that ambiguity allows way too much scope for “this year, next year, some vague date in the future”. What the current international Covid ­experience has taught us is that we may never be truly free from this menace; we are ­likely to dip in and out of new waves for an indeterminate time. And time is not on Scotland’s side, as we bid to escape the malign, choking embrace of the current UK Government.

It doesn’t help that Scottish Labour too suffers from selective deafness. Their ­polling ought to tell them that shedloads of their own troops don’t care to be told to stay in bed with uncle Boris until uncle Keir can locate a route back to power.

The new Yes campaigning tool is fine. Now let’s kickstart a serious new ­campaign. One embracing the whole Yes family.