EVERY night when Nicola Sturgeon retires to her bed, she could be forgiven for sleeping on a pillow branded with the Prime Minister’s face.

If the leader of the Scottish Nationalists could dream up the ideal political opponent to do constitutional battle with, he would bear a striking resemblance to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson; a tousle-haired quintessentially English Tory, who suffers from a tendency to bluster and whose jocular Woosterish appeal with voters diminishes the further north you travel from the Home Counties.

It was not by chance that during the effective three-year run-in to the 2014 independence poll that Mr Johnson, then Mayor of London, was not once seen making a high-profile visit on the campaign trail in Scotland. David Cameron wisely thought one Old Etonian toff on the stump was more than enough.

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Late last year, senior Tory sources confided that the PM would be a hindrance rather than a help to the Scottish election campaign and the party’s candidates would be lining up, privately, to urge him to stay well away from Scotland in the weeks before the May 6 poll.

In January during his controversial Covid-related trip to Glasgow and Livingston, Mr Johnson, when asked about the Holyrood elections, declared bullishly: “As for campaigning, wild horses won’t keep me away." Amid the political kerfuffle and with no sense of irony, No 10 made clear, the PM “loves” visiting Scotland.

But serious doubt has now been raised that the self-proclaimed Minister for the Union will not even manage to find time in his diary over the next four weeks to venture northwards to campaign for the Conservative cause in Scotland. 

And yet earlier this week Mr Johnson managed Covid-secure visits to Macclesfield and Truro. Indeed, both Keir Starmer for Labour and Ed Davey for the Liberal Democrats have in recent days ventured beyond Hadrian’s Wall to hit the campaign trail for their Scottish parties.

However, Douglas Ross has detected the sound of hooves, which might indeed keep his Conservative chum from pinning a blue rosette to his lapel and hitting the streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh or Moray.

The Scottish Tory leader, when pressed, admitted: “I am not sure he is going to come up. I had previously expected him to come up. Clearly, as we continue to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic this whole election is very different.”

Mr Ross was again keen to point out that “Central Office in London has no part to play in this campaign...It is a 100% Scottish Conservative campaign.”

But while Mr Johnson appears to have been sidelined, there were suggestions the part-time linesman himself had been taken off the pitch in favour of the soon-to-be-ennobled Ruth Davidson under whose leadership the Scottish Tories secured their best-ever electoral win in 2016 to become the main opposition at Holyrood for the first time.

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The fear now within blue circles is that Labour, under its new leader Anas Sarwar, could see a honeymoon bounce and push the Tories into third place at Holyrood. 

If it transpires Mr Johnson does indeed become the invisible man of the Holyrood campaign and confine himself to England, dare I suggest it will not go unnoticed. Indeed, the word “frit” might fall readily from the lips of his opponents.

Tory strategists might conclude better to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged Nationalists than suffer an SNP majority at Holyrood.

While senior Conservatives have suggested publicly all the PM need do in the face of the separatists gaining an overall majority on May 6 is “just keep saying no” to Indyref2, others privately believe this is politically untenable.

Seven years ago, of course, Ms Sturgeon and Alex Salmond insisted the referendum on Scotland’s future was a once-in-a-generation vote, or even a once-in-a-lifetime vote, to try to maximise support for independence. 

Scottish voters are fully aware of this. Yet, nonetheless, it seems certain they will, by a clear majority, say they want another one.

All Conservative energies now seem to be focused on preventing that SNP majority from materialising as it was this, achieved by the party led by Mr Salmond in 2011, that convinced Mr Cameron to concede a vote on Scotland’s place in the Union.

No 10 has been adamant it will not answer the question on “what if” Ms Sturgeon gets that Holyrood majority. Yet, Mr Johnson said in his speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference that only by voting Tory could people prevent Indyref2 from happening.

And just this week, the Scottish Conservatives, without equivocation, tweeted: “With just four more seats, the SNP will win a majority and hold another divisive independence referendum. You can stop it but only by giving your party list vote to the @ScotTories.”

The question is: would that be a poll reluctantly sanctioned by Westminster, as in the case of the 2014 vote, or would that be a poll the SNP has insisted it will hold anyway, by dint of a simple Holyrood majority in favour of Indyref2; the so-called Catalan-style “wild-cat poll”?

Politics, of course, is full of irony. Having publicly lambasted Boris for turning up to visit vaccine facilities in Scotland, SNP leaders may well be privately praying the blonde Beatle does indeed pay another visit to Scotland preferably as near to polling day as possible.

It may be Tory HQ has deemed a prime ministerial visit to Scotland in the current circumstances is simply too big a risk and Ms Sturgeon will have to dream on. 

 

Yet, if Scottish voters choose to give the head Nat her craved-for majority, Boris’s constitutional nightmare will have only just begun.