SCOTTISH Tory leader Douglas Ross is in the running for the understatement of the week award when he says Westminster’s move to dampen support for Scottish independence has had its “troubles”. The Union Unit has been a fiasco.

Since being set up towards the end of last year its achievements have amounted to a big fat zero. The first most of us heard about it was when its leader – former Ochil and Perth MP Luke Graham – was unceremoniously sacked barely three weeks ago.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse, with the unfortunate Graham’s replacement leaving the post two months after being appointed. Oliver Lewis reportedly fell victim to schisms within the Downing Street team which saw Michael Gove and Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds pitched against Johnson’s former chief of staff Dominic Cummings.

It’s not the departure of Lewis himself that interests me, not even the infighting which led to his departure. After all, political parties descend into internal rowing all the time. I can’t summon up the energy to even care much about the role of Cummings, although you’d have to feel good about anything which makes his position in modern British politics even more wobbly than it currently seems.

What I find baffling is why the Prime Minister’s strategy for winning hearts and minds for the Union is so completely useless.

It could of course be down to simple incompetence. Just look at his performance over Brexit, which saw Britain leaving the EU with just about the worst deal imaginable. The queues of lorries full of rotting produce as they tried in vain to reach European markets were a testament to the Prime Minister’s lack of ability to grasp a brief.

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You could criticise former Tory prime minister David Cameron for many things – not least of them calling the EU referendum in the first place – but at least he had the sense to recognise Scots’ antipathy towards the Tories meant he had to look elsewhere for a frontman to lead Better Together. OK, Alistair Darling wasn’t exactly inspiring but imagine some of the alternatives. There’s no way any of us would have got to the end of a Gordon Brown speech and still been awake.

There’s absolutely no evidence that Boris Johnson has the slightest clue what people in Scotland think about anything. Soon after becoming Prime Minister he appointed himself Minister of the Union when anyone who had been in Scotland for longer than five minutes would be aware that he was widely regarded as a buffoon north of the Border.

The front page of the first edition of the Sunday National back in 2018 bore the headline: “Boris set to go for PM and trigger indyref2”. We were able to accurately predict that without the aid of psychic powers because it was so blindingly obvious. Since then matters have got worse rather than better.

When he decided to appoint Luke Graham as leader of the Union Unit he must have known that he had few qualifications for the job. Graham had been a Scottish MP for barely two years. During that time he had done nothing to inspire confidence in his ability to win friends and influence people north of the Border.

WATCH: Nicola Sturgeon hits out at Union Unit for saying knowledge of Scotland isn't needed

What encouraged Johnson to give him the job? Was it a punishment for Graham’s support for Michael Gove’s campaign to become Tory leader? If so the Prime Minister has certainly had his revenge now.

It’s impossible to say if Oliver Lewis would have been more successful in the role given how little time he was in it. It’s certainly true to say that his appointment had more to do with internal Downing Street machinations than an affinity with Scotland.

He did, however, boast the necessary attributes listed in recent ads for recruits to join the Union Unit in that he had no knowledge of the country whose threatened departure from the UK the organisation had been established to thwart.

Boris Johnson may have been driven by a determination to “get Brexit done” but the fact is that the United Kingdom was not united in sharing that ambition. Scotland voted to remain in the EU but the arithmetic of the Union meant that Scotland’s wishes were ignored, just as we are continually outvoted in general elections.

The Prime Minister’s reaction to our different view was to ignore it, to belittle those we elected to represent us in Westminster and to dismiss out of hand every suggestion they put forward which might have limited the damage Brexit would wreak upon our economy.

He must now realise that his attitude is helping to grow the number of Scots who support independence but he does nothing to soften it. He ignores our views and simply tells us to like it or lump it. When we make it clear that we want a second independence referendum in opinion poll after opinion poll he simply denies democracy and vows to block it.

Why has he continued adopting a strategy guaranteed to alienate Scots? Is it because he is influenced by an increasingly powerful brand of British nationalism that sees the Union as mainly England with a few added bits? Is it because a lifetime of privilege and wealth has robbed him of the ability to empathise with others with different experiences? Or because he just can’t be bothered to care what people think in a land he knows nothing about.

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I would guess that all three of those alternatives play a part in shaping the Prime Minister’s attitude but there is a more troubling possibility. Johnson doesn’t care because he doesn’t need to care. He doesn’t need Scottish votes to remain in power. If anything the loss of the country would make his position more secure.

He set up the Union Unit to be seen to do something – anything – to tick the box. No UK Prime Minister wants to preside over the break-.up of the Union. Particularly not one representing the Conservative and UNIONIST Party. It’s generally accepted that the Prime Minister who finds themselves in that unfortunate position would have to resign. The Union Unit allows Johnson to say: “I did everything I could, Look … I even set up this special unit and threw money at it.”

He doesn’t care that there is a clear democratic case for a second independence referendum because he believes he doesn’t need to care. Why risk the prospect of losing a referendum when you can stop one taking place for as long as you are in power? For a whole generation. Johnson will do the bare minimum to preserve the Union because he doesn’t really believe its under threat as long as he can block the referendum. It’s up to us to prove him wrong.