Jacob Rees-Mogg did Douglas Ross a favour by calling him ‘lightweight’

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, was surprisingly unsophisticated in defending the prime minister. He said that Douglas Ross, a fellow MP who is also leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, “has always been quite a lightweight figure”. Ross had called for Boris Johnson to resign for serious reasons, and deserved a serious response rather than an insult.

But Rees-Mogg may have helped Ross rather than hurt him, because a problem for the unionist parties in Scotland is that they are presented by the Scottish National Party as the puppets of their Westminster bosses. That may be a large part of the explanation for Ross’s detachment from the prime minister in the first place.

Ross resigned as a junior minister in protest against Johnson’s failure to sack Dominic Cummings for breaking the lockdown rules in May 2020, a declaration of (relative) independence that helped him secure the leadership of the Scottish Tories three months later.

Johnson is so unpopular in Scotland that no politician can expect to gain a hearing there unless they distance themselves from him, and Ross, who is also a member of the Scottish parliament, has to align himself with his 30 fellow members of that parliament, rather than with his seven fellow Scottish members of the House of Commons. All 31 Tory MSPs have said that Johnson should stand down as prime minister.

So Rees-Mogg’s rudeness towards Ross is likely only to enhance the Scottish Tory leader’s credibility in Scotland, allowing him to present himself, as Ruth Davidson did, as the leader of a distinct grouping that has nothing to do with those dreadful English Tories in London.

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This will not overcome Ross’s fundamental problem, which is that the unionist parties are divided, while the parties that support independence work effectively together, despite last year’s attempt by Alex Salmond to split them.

The Scottish Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats all make their separate cases for the UK to stay together, while being traduced by the SNP as branch offices of their UK parties. Meanwhile, the SNP and the Scottish Greens – who are increasingly a branch office of the SNP – are in a coalition government that presents a united pro-independence face.

That is a structural problem of Scottish unionist politics that cannot easily be solved. In the meantime, given that a Conservative government for the whole of the UK – and a government led by Boris Johnson in particular – is one of the most effective recruiting tools for the SNP, having one of Johnson’s lieutenants hurl insults in his direction can do Douglas Ross no harm at all.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator