AT the heart of July we ought to be well on our way to the silly season. Tools down. Taps aff. Green sap rising. The sun in the heavens. Holyrood in recess. Westminster snoozily running down days until the summer holidays. In a just country, portly Tory MPs should be turning their minds to regattas and straw boaters, double-breasted blazers and bottom-hugging chinos.

Highland politicians should be returning to their constituencies to be eaten alive by midgies under the blanketing haze of a summer smir.

Scottish tourists the world over should be working the national alchemy of turning ivory to puce by applying little more than 15 minutes of direct sunlight. Anxious news editors ought to be scouring the land for anything defensibly reportable in the dog days to come.

For the French, this is la morte-saison. For reasons which escape me, the Dutch call this period in their news cycle “cucumber time”, which if you ask me, sounds more like a memorable phase in the Bullingdon Club’s admission ritual.

But instead, this July? The sky is overcast. The politics is unrelenting. On the mantelpiece, largely ignored amidst the midsummer hullaballoo the Tory party has created, the Brexit clock continues to lose hours, minutes and seconds.

And on telly, Andrew Neil, like an ancient tabby with a malicious gleam in either eye and a flash of claws, bats about the two mice in contention to lead the Conservative Party.

In less than two weeks time, we’ll know how grandly Boris Johnson has swept the Tory membership off its feet.

Looking at Theresa May’s presumptive successor, you may see charlatanry and hollow gamesmanship; a burbling, bouncing distillation of the intellectual and moral qualities of modern British politics.

Polling data already suggests, for a number of our fellow citizens, the prospect of a Johnson premiership gives their confidence in the United Kingdom a nasty knock. Well, let’s see shall we.

The political and personal vices of Boris Johnson are well-documented. His high-profile interviews this week reveal a soul dumb to detail, a last-minute character who thrives on cheap points, confidence tricks and verbal flourishes.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson doges questions during BBC interview

He is, as Matthew Parris wrote in the Times yesterday, the very essence of a sort of newspaper columnist. “You are counsel for the prosecution or defence of an idea, or dream, or fear, hatred, party or politician,” Parris writes. “You take a brief, elbow doubt and ambiguity aside, and go — joyously or ferociously but always (in the moment) with passion and conviction — full pelt. What columnism is not is making absolutely sure first that you’re right.”

Just so. This country already knows what it is like to be ruled by a just-in-time, essay deadline Prime Minister. Johnson’s Oxford contemporary, David Cameron, gave us an object lesson in this kind of superficially confident leadership. But peering back up at the Brexit clock, every day lost is a day the United Kingdom can ill-afford to lose. Now is no time for a columnist.

Last week, Theresa May told us that our Precious Union™ stood on both sand and rock. It was in jeopardy, but firmly rooted.

Perhaps a better metaphor – for any political system, at any time – is an acrobat, suspended mid-air, mid-routine. In some sections of our acrobat’s journey through open space, their vaults and plunges will be more and less death-defying. Sometimes, they’ll take risks. In other passages, the safe old routines will seem to do the trick.

Sometimes, the ropes holding our showman suspended will be strong, and sometimes weak. Some lines will be ductile. Others will be inclined to tense and shatter under the strain of the showman’s arcs and plunges.

Sometimes, the creative skydancer will soar towards new ropes – new handholds – as others come loose in their fingers. Sometimes, our dauntless artist will miss their trapeze altogether, finding the old familiar guys won’t hold them up any longer. Sometimes, the acrobat falls.

This is one reason I prefer acrobats to foundation stones. The image tears away illusions of security. The idea of foundations is too complacent, too comfortable, too binary.

The acrobat state is an image of creative jeopardy. It gives us better tools to think with.

When you understand the Union as a spider’s web of connections holding the project aloft – you can begin to pick out the thicker belts of connection, the thin lines of feeling, and see the torn ends of the bonds which have now snapped. Hanging by a thread is still hanging on.

Surveying the field, it’s remarkable how many ropes and guys have snapped since 2014 or now find themselves under impossible strain.

Once, industrial solidarity had real roots in people’s lived experience, the trades they worked in and the contracts they serviced.

Margaret Thatcher’s reforms trimmed that tendon thin. In 2014, Better Together were able to use the uncertainties around an independent Scotland’s future in the United Kingdom as an aerial hoop to dodge the threat to its integrity. Brexit has worn that line to a whisper.

The strange death of Scottish Labour must have been a discombobulating moment for Scottish Tories.

On the one hand, seeing one of your old opponents thrown into jeopardy must have brought with it a twinge of pleasure. But on the other, for all of its Tammany Hall inclinations towards civic rottenness, for all its strengths and faults, its achievements and its vices, the Labour Party represented one reliable hand-hold for the Union acrobat to swing from.

That too has vanished into the darkness and it is one of the reasons why this Tory party is struggling to keep its balance.

In the short term, it has suited Ruth Davidson to depict her Labour colleagues as squishes on the Union, constitutional faint-hearts, who can’t be trusted to shout “never, never, never” into the void with the gusto Tory voters now seem addicted to.

Politics is a funny business. Dig deep enough and you often find the germs of defeat planted in today’s triumph.

With its late-in-the-day panic about the state of the Union, the UK Government shows little understanding of any of this. The main problem according to Theresa May’s “Union Cabinet” seems to be David Mundell’s limited budget for spin, as if the problems of the Union were principally problems of insufficient Facebook advertising and an absence of tidy memes on Dover House’s official Twitter feed.

During the whole Brexit process, this column has argued that the problems of Brexit are not problems of personality.

It wasn’t May’s personality which devised the Northern Ireland backstop. The border problems with the Republic of Ireland did not emerge because of the personalities of the British negotiating team, and won’t be eliminated by introducing a dandelion-headed fop with an outsized personality into the equation.

Our redeemer doesn’t live, and certainly doesn’t represent Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in the House of Commons.

But there is a lesson here, too, I think, for proponents of Scottish independence and our reaction to this new prime minister.

Don’t get lost in arguments about personality. They’re evanescent. Independence is ultimately about changing the state. By all means, roast Johnson when he merits it. Call out the flaws and the follies in this broken character. But at the end of the day, he is one man.

A better argument is this. What does the elevation of Boris Johnson tell us about the state of British politics? What does the value it places on him tell us about the virtues this country now values? What does his success tell us about the rules of the game?