Boris’s no-deal Brexit optimism won’t just land us an even messier divorce, it’ll push Scotland to file the papers too

As Boris Johnson should know better than most, divorces are always time-consuming, usually messy, and often bitter. So it is proving with the United Kingdom’s break-up with the European Union, after 45 years of uneasy marital life (ever-closer conjugal relations having long since been abandoned)...But, as they say, we must also think of the kids. In the case of this slightly stretched analogy – which isn’t meant to be condescending – that means Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It is not as if they could be, say, members of the EU on weekdays, and inside the UK at weekends. It’s tricky.

So the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has despatched the “minister for the union”, Boris Johnson, on a grand, but rather brief, tour to reassure the kids that no-deal Brexit will actually bring our family of nations together, and tighten for “the ties that bind the UK”, as he puts it.

Now he faces the toughest assignment of them all – Nicola Sturgeon, a thistle in human form. For Johnson it’ll be like an old time English comic turning up for a gig at the Glasgow Empire. As they used to say of the place: “If they liked you they let you live”.

For at least some of the time he will be accompanied by Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, and an uneasy partner since Johnson sacked her auld mate David Mundell, who officiated at her marriage. It will only add to the awkwardness of the situation, and I’m not sure Johnson’s routine, honed in the oh-so-English oxford union and House of Commons will go down so well with a Scottish crowd.

It reminds me of an old story Ken Dodd told about a now forgotten light entertainment pair called Mike and Bernie Winters back in the 1960s: “Mike comes on to the Glasgow Empire stage playing the clarinet to an audience clearly suffering from terminal boredom. A few minutes’ later Bernie goofballs from the side of a curtain, causing a punter to scream out in anguish: “Christ, there’s two of them!”

Or maybe Johnson will emulate Doddy himself: “Anyway, I went on and said to the audience, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve sent for you.’” That was bold, Ken. And funny. “Then one bloke shouted: ‘What a horrible sight!’ and collapsed drunk in a heap. From that point on the audience were with me.”

Anyway, wee Johnson has something that no other Englishman encountering this hostile environment usually has, which is £300m in his pocket. This is his one trick, seen in Manchester at the weekend, which is to buy the popularity (ie votes) he so obviously craves. Many years ago, the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, faced with a collapsing economy and a famine in the countryside took himself and his Cadillac to console his people, and passed bundle of banknotes to his flunkies to feed from the window, which was opened just a crack. A year later he was strangled to death after the communists took over in a coup d’état. The Scots have a similarly robust attitude towards being condescended to.

The more English the politician, the more the Scottish people resent the union, and the more chance of them voting for Scottish independence. The only thing that would prevent them from doing so is the notion that they’d be even worse off as a result. But then they might ask what is the point of staying in a union being run by this English numpty and his Aberdonian numpty mate, Michael Gove, who sits for a constituency in Surrey. Johnson is the most unwelcome Englishman to journey north of the border since William, “Butcher” Cumberland commanded the English redcoats at the Battle of Culloden, 1746 (a man to whom Johnson is distantly related, I can unhelpfully add).

The polls confirm the impression that this posh-sounding Eton-educated, Islingtonian, MP for Henley and then Uxbridge, is the most “English” figure to lord it over them since Margaret Thatcher, the woman who enjoyed a relationship with Scotland of comprehensive mutual incomprehension. She treated the place like a sort of laboratory for mad ideas such as the poll tax.

Like every Conservative leader since 1955, the Conservatives have failed to win anything like a mandate to govern in Scotland. Having been wiped out entirely in the 1997 election, they’ve staged a mild and unwelcome comeback since, like TB, after the Scots had considered it eradicated. They voted against Brexit. I can’t imagine how few members of the Conservative Party there are in Scotland – maybe single figure thousands, and of those I can only guess how few voted for MacBoris the Brave.

You know Johnson would, if he could, concoct a suitable legend of some long lost ancestor and gleefully put a kilt on, and put on an accent like Chic Murray or Rab Nesbitt, if he thought he might save a single Scottish Conservative seat. He is indeed brave – a man who loves to be loved going to the very place where, apart from Liverpool, he is despised. Maybe they’ll let him live. Maybe not.