THE Scottish Conservatives exist in a twilight world where everything is rubbish and if you are not actually permanently enraged and miserable, then you jolly well ought to be. Given the manifest and multiple inadequacies of the Conservative government at Westminster, it's very difficult for Douglas Ross and his band of table-thumping misery guts to point to what's going on south of the Border as a shining example of how things should be done.

Indeed, Douglas already operates in a strange parallel universe in which Scotland is already independent because he acts as though the decisions of the British Government have no impact at all on Scotland where in his view the devolved Scottish Government bears sole responsibility for absolutely everything lamentable. Any credit and praise which might be offered is naturally a reserved matter solely for the Westminster government.

However since there is very little which is praiseworthy which emanates from the serial offence to common decency which is the Johnson regime, Douglas Ross would rather pretend that the Conservative Party at Westminster where he sits as a Tory MP has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with him.

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So you won't find the Scottish Conservative bah-humbugger-in-chief wishing to draw attention to the fact that the stricter Covid measures maintained by the Scottish Government have been more successful than Johnson's wanton disregard at keeping the number of Covid cases in check.

For the week ending December 1, the seven day average of new Covid cases in Scotland was 2551. For England, for the same period the average daily figure was 36,846 new cases. The population of Scotland is 5.45 million. The population of England is 55.98 million, just over ten times the Scottish population. If new cases of Covid were occurring in Scotland at the same rate as they are in England where the Conservatives have sole responsibility for tackling the pandemic, we'd currently be seeing around 3600 new Covid cases in Scotland every day and Douglas Ross would be bouncing up and down at FMQs demanding that Nicola Sturgeon resign for putting the lives of so many at risk.

Instead, in his increasingly risible attempts to attack the Scottish Government's handling of the response to the pandemic, Ross decided to give his harrumphage an outing over what he insisted was a "backlog" of two million people across Scotland waiting for their jag. This would indeed be appalling given that as we've seen there are only 5.45 million people in the country, and by Ross's estimation 40% of the entire nation is waiting impatiently in a "backlog".

The claim produced well-justified laughs of derision from the SNP. There are 2.2 million in Scotland waiting for their booster jag principally because the eligibility criteria was expanded to include all over-18s just a couple of days ago and the gap between the second jag and the booster was reduced from six months to three.

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Not even the most efficient and well-organised Scottish Government is going to be able to deliver 2.2m Covid jags in two days, but Douglas isn't about to allow that to get between him and some manufactured outrage.

In fact just as it is doing with preventing new cases, Scotland is doing rather better than England when it comes to the delivery of Covid jags. As an exasperated Nicola Sturgeon pointed out, in Scotland, 90.9% of the population have had their first jag compared to 88.5% in England. In Scotland, 82.6% have had their second jag, whereas 80.4% in England have had theirs. Scotland is also doing better at delivering booster shots, 36% of over 12s have had theirs compared to 32.2% in England.

Notwithstanding the complaints of Douglas Ross, Scotland is likely to roll out the booster more quickly than the Conservative-controlled health system in England, and that will be something else that Douglas Ross doesn't want to draw attention to.