TOTAL bull was spouted by Boris Johnson at the Tory Party conference. But it was bull delivered with such gusto and self-confidence that the Tory leader is still the bookies favourite to win the next General Election, despite unprecedented shortages and price hikes in gas, food, staff and petrol.

One part of these islands is asking – why not?

The other asks – how can that buffoon possibly get in again?

Those parts are called England and Scotland.

And in the wake of yet another Johnson speech that was long on rhetoric and short on policy and compassion – never has it been clearer that the two countries are political strangers and growing further apart every passing year.

Clearly Tory delegates were delighted with Johnson – a leader so confident he can take the mick out of Michael “Jon Bon Govi” Gove.

A leader so tactless he can joke about the pandemic – “Crime is falling and not just because we locked up the public for most of last year”.

A COP26 leader so off message he can only taunt climate activists: “I’m glad Priti Patel is taking new powers to insulate [the M25 climate protestors] snugly in prison where they belong.”

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And a premier so behind the curve he thinks toilet stops for truckers “instead of urinating in the bushes” represents social progress.

Voila, Boris Johnson. And voila the big difference between the English and Scottish electorates.

Though it was detail-lite and ideas-free, I’ll wager that performance has probably won over floating English voters.

Why? Cos no-one does empty, wordy, flourish-ridden ebullience like the Tory leader. And that seems to be all many southern voters expect.

Of course, Boris in full tilt can be fluent and amusing in a patrician kind of way. Take his dismissal of Keir Starmer: “a serious, rattled bus conductor pushed along by his Sellotape-spectacled sans culottes”.

How many voters, indeed how many Tory delegates, are familiar with that reference to the French Revolutionaries? Or indeed the “Tartarean pit” from whose depths his “chestnuts” were apparently rescued by wonderful nurses. It's the Greek mythological “dungeon of the damned” - a reference so obscure that BBC Politics misspelled it, but totally familiar for an old Etonian who studied Classics at Oxford University. So, the Prime Minister talked over the heads of his entire audience, breaking all the rules of good communications – yet in being so authentically and unapologetically himself – the audience actually revelled in being patronised.

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So we have Boris Johnson – a leader supremely comfortable in his own skin.

And Sir Keir Starmer – a man whose slow, studied delivery and excruciating exploration of his own family background fairly creaked by comparison.

Starmer could hardly bring himself to mention Brexit.

But Johnson had the brass-neck to sweep his many policy failures into a New Tomorrow – where shortages are remedied by employers paying higher pay (don’t mention the higher prices that will inevitably result) not relaxing immigration (since Brexit has treble-locked that door).

The smug, born-to-rule quality of Boris Johnson is precisely what scunners the majority of Scots.

And yet it does exactly the opposite south of the Border, where his half-truth version of Britain’s state of permanent crisis seems strangely mesmerising.

It works – except for folk who find counter-narratives springing to mind unbidden as each powerful porky is uttered. There are some in England. There are many in Scotland.

SO, for example, Boris says he wants workers back in the office five days a week to have “creative water cooler conversations”. Or is it so that his donor pals can make sure the office blocks they bought with offshore funds keep rising in value?

Boris mocks “lefty Islington lawyers” – but does he think we don’t remember that he lived with a lawyer in a £3.75 million Islington townhouse for 10 years?

Boris evokes the “spirit” of the England Euros squad – a team his Home Secretary encouraged supporters to boo.

Boris claims 48 new hospitals have been built. But English NHS trusts have been told to describe any building work on existing sites as “new hospitals”.

Boris says he’ll fix the NHS, Social Care and the unbalanced economy.

But who unbalanced it? Wee clue – there’s been a Conservative Prime Minister since May, 2010.

Boris says the UK will become a high-productivity, high-wage economy. But output per worker under the Conservatives has grown by a measly 0.4%. In the Blair/Brown years it grew by an annual 2.2%.

Meanwhile, no British government of any stripe has matched the productivity rates of our Nordic neighbours who combine high wages with high personal taxation to finance a proper welfare state and high-quality public services – not delivered on the cheap by private companies.

And then there’s the worst deceit. Yesterday Boris talked about plans to “level-up”, just hours before he plunged millions of children into poverty through the biggest overnight cut to social security in post-war history.

So given that his speech was a load of baloney, maybe the key question is not what it says about his Tory government, but what it reveals about the electorate.

It’s the question running through the minds of every National reader – what is wrong with English voters? Why don’t they see what we see? Why don’t they cringe at the smirking, shabby attempts to drum up a fake Rule Britannia sense of national pride? Why don’t they smell a rat when Boris promises to help the poorest while picking their pockets?

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Is England swallowing the American dream just as Joe Biden is tiptoeing away from it – creating a basic European-style safety net for all American citizens – at long last? Are English voters so tempted by the infinitesimally small chance to make it big that they’re ready to tolerate Covid billionaires, crony contracts and naked bribes to enter a House of Lords so enormous, it’s the world’s only second chamber larger than its democratically elected other half?

It’s a puzzle because our English cousins are not stupid people.

They are relatives, partners, sons, daughters and parents. They once voted for the same Labour Party that set up the NHS and welfare state. And yet they are standing idly by as the post-war settlement is dismantled by a showman. The only answer is the one that also drives the cause of independence.

Scots start from a different position with a different political outlook, because we are a different country with a different outlook that is closer to other North European countries.

Like our neighbours, we tend to believe an equal society is a happier one, a democratic society a more efficient one, and a dog-eat-dog society something best avoided. It’s why we’ve voted for Labour/Social Democratic parties over a century and against all British trends.

As the late, great William McIlvanney said, “Scotland’s national saying is not, ‘Wha daur mess wi me’ – it’s ‘that’s no fair’.”

Fairness. It’s at the core of our politics.

And no matter how Nicola Sturgeon performs, how groovily Michael Gove dances or how fluently Boris Johnson dissembles – that truth is the enduring driver of Scottish independence.

Scots’ voting history is as different to the UK’s as it’s possible to get.

We envisage a different society and are impressed by different things because of different political, religious and cultural traditions. Those deep roots were buried during long centuries of colonial rule – but not severed. And they are re-emerging now – and at lightning speed when confronted by political chancers.

So, no matter how much Boris Johnson’s empty, high-energy style is lauded south of the Border, it will continue to cut no ice north of it.