The world has turned and left us – so who can put some cool into Britannia?

Many north of the Border would love to return the compliment with all the venom of an Andy Murray forehand (circa 2013, preferably). But we’re a polite bunch this side of the fence so instead of ignoring Ms Truss when she arrived in Perth last Tuesday to try to persuade the party’s few Scottish members of her worth, we turned up to shout at her instead. How’s that for not ignoring someone?

Nor was it just Ms Truss who was not being ignored. Protestors outside the venue chose to also not ignore BBC Scotland political reporter James Cook. Through no fault of his own he found himself in contravention of one of the grand rules of journalism – stay ignored unless you have your hand up, and do not become the story – when he was targeted for abuse of the verbal and hen-related sort. ‘Traitor’ was one of the insults lobbed his way. There were other things too. Eggs, according to one report.

Again, how rude. Maybe we’re not that polite after all. Maybe some of us should look in the mirror. Or, more appropriate, recall that Scotland also has a proud history of fair and balanced journalism and, whatever you think of the BBC and its perceived stance on the independence question, remember that words like ‘traitor’ are favourites of the Brexit-supporting, Donald Trump-loving, Jair Bolsonaro-boosting right. It is not cool to shout such things at journalists. This is not Russia. This is not a Proud Boys rally. This is not a boozy, £1000-a-head dinner with Nigel Farage.

It is not cool to similarly abuse politicians. As for the politicians themselves, well they’re just not cool, period. Most of them, anyway. Liz Truss, who has been variously described as “very odd”, “truly useless”, “a human hand grenade” and “about as close to properly crackers as anyone I’ve met in Parliament”, is definitely not cool. You can’t be when you have a favourite potato (hers is the Norfolk Peer) and use your time on the conference platform to talk about cheese (not just the conference platform, either. In 2015 she regaled a Daily Telegraph journalist about her love of Gloucestershire delicacy Stinking Bishop).

Truss’s rival for the job of UK Prime Minister, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, is also not cool. And this despite his hand-made, £3500 suits with their fashionably short trouser legs, his £490 Prada shoes, his £335 trainers, and his crisp white shirts. Given that there’s only Sunak and Truss in the running for the top job, it’s safe to say the next occupant of No 10 is going to be deeply uncool.

Contrast that with the man currently squatting there. You see, Boris Johnson is actually very cool – at least according to young Ukrainian street mural artist Anastasia Scherba. Guardian correspondent Luke Harding ran into her last week while filming in the southern city of Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home town. She was perched on a huge scaffolding tower working on a wall mural of a rather familiar looking figure. Yup, the greased piglet.

“Would you mind telling us why Boris Johnson is here?” Harding asked.

“Well, because he’s cool,” Ms Scherba answered. I don’t know the Ukrainian for ‘D’oh’, but I reckon it was implied.

“Cool?” said Harding, slightly disbelieving.

“He supported Ukraine and we are very grateful for that. We wanted to do it bigger, to paint a house with nine floors, but getting permission for that takes a long time.”

Harding should have replied: not if you’re a Tory party donor and can have planning regulations bent to suit your wishes. Instead he turned to the camera and said simply: “This Boris Johnson has appeared since yesterday. Like a miracle, I suppose you could say.” Then he went back to something which made a little more sense than someone painting a mural of everyone’s least favourite Old Etonian. The war.

For the record, Boris Johnson isn’t actually cool.

Liz Truss would like to be, though. She would love to see her likeness painted on a gable end by a hip young woman in cut-off jeans and a baseball cap, and for it to be a generous and celebratory artistic gesture rather than, er, satirical. It’s one reason, I think, that she is so keen on Instagram, the social media platform which allows you to curate, edit, sculpt and shape your online persona. To look cool, in other words. Even when you’re not.

A greater measure of coolness for Ms Truss would be to appear in a cool magazine. Vogue, for instance. Speaking at a Fringe event this month, actually an interview with Conservative-supporting political commentator Iain Dale, the First Minister regaled her audience with a story about meeting Ms Truss at last year’s COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow and how the subject of Vogue came up. Ms Sturgeon, as it happens, had recently appeared in the magazine.

“That was the main thing she wanted to talk to me about,” she told Dale. “She wanted to know how she could get into Vogue. I said to her ‘They came and asked me’.” At this bombshell Truss “looked a little bit as if she’d swallowed a wasp … I remember it because there we were at the world’s biggest climate change conference in Glasgow, world leaders about to arrive. That was the main topic of conversation she was interested in pursuing. And once we’d exhausted that it kind of dried up.”

Ms Sturgeon has actually been in the magazine twice, one more time than US Vice President Kamala Harris, though she still has a way to go to beat Michelle Obama. She has featured three times. Melania Trump was snubbed entirely when she was First Lady – and she used to be a model.

Meanwhile a 2020 article about female politicians who have changed the world featured New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who’s cool, and Finnish leader Sanna Marin. Ms Marin was the world’s youngest head of state when she was appointed, aged 34, and just last week was dubbed “the world’s coolest prime minister” by German magazine, Bild. Now 36, she still loves a good nightclub, though her love of raving has landed her in a bit of bother. Recent footage of her dancing at a house party with a Finnish popstar has created something of a backlash, and in December she was forced to apologise for going clubbing after being told she was a close contact of someone with Covid. Kids, eh?

Love it or loathe it, the Cool Britannia period of the mid-to-late 1990s was marked by an increased sense of optimism and dynamism, and in Scotland by a cultural renaissance which lasted until at least the early Noughties. And love him or loathe him, Tony Blair’s premiership was sort of cool, in a way a Truss-or-Sunak one never will be. It’s ironic, really, because the Brexit which Rishi Sunak championed and Liz Truss has belatedly become fanatical about was supposed to foster just that sort of optimism and dynamism. It was meant to usher in Cool Britannia v2. Instead we have inflation at 10% and rising, energy bills heading for £4000 a year (or one Rishi Sunak suit and a spare pair of breeks if you like) and there is, quite literally, **** being pumped into our rivers. If ever we needed some political cool, it’s now.