BY this time next week, the UK will have a new prime minister, one elected by a tiny and unrepresentative group of people. Barring some miracle, that prime minister will be Boris Johnson, a man who has adopted faux-cheeky chappie floundering as a political philosophy. Boris Johnson is the least trustworthy man ever to occupy Number 10, and the baseline is set very low. This is a man who lies even when he’s talking to himself.

The face of the Conservative Party in Scotland is little better. We don’t hear much any more about Ruth Davidson as the doughty defender of Scotland’s interests, the leader of a tightly disciplined bloc of Scottish Conservative MPs who would vote together to protect Scottish interests within the UK. But then Ruth too is a practitioner of the faux-cheepie chappie floundering brand of politics. The reason she despises Boris Johnson so much is that he’s a mirror image of herself. Both of them tell themselves that everything will be OK if only they can practise a more convincing smile.

The Conservatives have trashed Scotland’s trust, treated us with contempt, ignored all our concerns and fears, and yet they expect us to be OK with it day after day. That’s because the one thing that no Tory is faking is their belief in their god-given right to rule.

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Meanwhile the Labour Party is continuing on its own descent into madness, consumed by a row about anti-Semitism that refuses to go away, a row that a halfway competent leader would have nipped in the bud many months ago.

On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show over the weekend, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said that “no-one can pretend that there isn’t an ongoing problem within Labour,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that pretty much everyone around Jeremy Corbyn is pretending that there is no ongoing problem within Labour.

But this isn’t about personalities. The British ship of state blindly sailing towards the iceberg is not primarily due to the individual and personal failures of the Boris Johnsons, Ruth Davidsons, and Jeremy Corbyns of this world, legion as those failings are. Certainly those personal shortcomings have contributed to the problem, but the real issue here is a British political system which rewards inadequate people with power, and which then permits them, encourages them, to put their personal agendas before the interests of the people whom they affect to represent.

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Then it makes it all but impossible to dislodge that person from their privilege, no matter how inept they prove to be. Boris Johnson’s likely victory in the Conservative leadership contest represents the nadir of this long standing tendency in British politics. The problem here is not personal, it’s structural.

The famously unwritten British constitution only functioned as long as the norms and conventions of which it consists were respected by those in power. There was no rule that said that a prime minister who had failed to get their defining policy through parliament had to resign. Prime ministers resigned because it was the honourable thing to do. Nowadays unless there is an actual law, a definite legal sanction, politicians will blithely sail on regardless. Theresa May had no moral problem with repeatedly returning to the House of Commons with the same deal that had already been rejected.

Likewise there is no legal consquence on a government in Westminster that refuses to respect a mandate possessed by the Scottish Parliament for an independence referendum.

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The previous understanding was that if the people of Scotland voted for a party which campaigned on such a mandate, if it and other parties supporting it managed to obtain a majority in Holyrood, then the people of Scotland would be deemed to have spoken. A prime minister with a concept of honour and the much vaunted British sense of fair play would not stand in the way of the Scottish people.

Honour and fair play were never to be conceded to the little people. These conventions only operated within the rarified atmosphere of members of the British establishment. But even that has broken down now. What we see now are politicians like Theresa May, Jo Swinson, Ruth Davidson, or the Conservative leadership candidates, resort to self-serving sophistry as they try to deny the indisputable fact that there is a majority in Holyrood for another independence referendum. There are no longer any constraints on the mediocrity of those in power.

The tensions that this decline in public standards has created will come to a head when Boris Johnson attempts to solve the conundrum of Brexit, and will be defeated by it. There is a pleasing sense of the completion of a circle in witnessing the architect of Brexit being destroyed by it. Or there would be if it were not for the collateral damage to jobs, livelihoods and futures.

Living in the UK these days is like living in a town near a dam, behind which the waters are rising. The dam is poorly maintained, neglected and in poor repair.

There are still plenty of people in Scotland who believe that the dam will hold, that the British state will withstand the pressures placed upon it by the weight of its unrealistic expectations and its belief in its exceptionalism.

But even those people are now beginning to have second thoughts and are starting to consider evacuation to an independent Scotland.

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Just this weekend, I heard of a couple of older men, convinced No voters in 2014, who would vote Yes in a future referendum. They don’t want to live in the wreckage of Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain.

All over Scotland, people are reporting similar anecdotes, as friends and neighbours of their own, people they would never have dreamed would support independence, are starting to change their minds. They’re changing their minds because those who steer the British ship of state can no longer pretend to be competent.

This is how the UK will end, brought down not by the SNP or the Scottish independence movement, but by those people who claim to love it the most. But their words are hollow.

What they love more are their careers, their positions, and their privileges. That will be both their undoing, and the undoing of the so-called precioussssss Union.