AS I reached for my largest mug to make my obligatory FMQs cup of tea, I felt a pang of guilt.

Surely, if I was really serious about my job, I should be pouring a glass of wine, instead?

This is clearly where us little people have been going wrong all these years. When the Conservative party squawk about levelling-up what they are actually talking about is showing the country how committed they are to day-drinking.

Those of us who don’t have the constitution for hard liquor during working hours will just have to accept that prestige and riches are beyond our reach.

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As proceedings at Holyrood got under way, I’ve never wished so hard for access to Douglas Ross’s inner thoughts.

He’s had a difficult 24 hours, undoubtedly made worse by the fact that he had no work events planned so couldn’t get legless to blot it all out.

To recap – on Wednesday he became the most senior Tory to come out and say that Boris Johnson should resign.

The Scottish Tory leader, like the rest of us, found Johnson’s faux-apology wholly unconvincing. Apparently, the Prime Minister couldn’t even reassure Douglas Ross that there weren’t more damaging revelations to come.

Now we’re seeing a curiously poetic row emerge between the Scottish and UK Tories.

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In what I’m sure he believed was a helpful intervention, minister for the 17th century Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed Douglas Ross as a "lightweight".

The views of Mr Ross and his Holyrood MSPs – who overwhelmingly agree that the Prime Minister should resign – were ridiculed. The message from the Westminster crew to their (former) pals up north was clear: eat your cereal, Scottish Tories.

At FMQs Douglas Ross smiled his way through the First Minister’s first mention of his party’s partygate troubles, joking that not many people in Scotland – or even in his own party – could imagine him becoming first minister.

He emerged largely unscathed from their initial exchanges, where he questioned the First Minister about financial support for businesses.

But he will have known, as sure as there is to be wine and cheese at a Downing Street meeting, that one of her backbenchers would give her the prompt she needed to really let rip.

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It did, and off she went.

"I have big political differences with Douglas Ross, but even I am not as derogatory about him as his own Tory colleagues.

"'Not a big figure’, ‘lightweight’ – these might be personal insults directed at the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, but actually, they say something much deeper about the Westminster establishment’s utter contempt for Scotland.

"If they can’t even show basic respect for their own colleagues, what chance do the rest of us have? The fact is, Westminster thinks that Scotland doesn’t need to be listened to and now we’re being told to thole a Prime Minister that his own colleagues think is not fit for office.

"Independence is fundamentally about empowerment and aspiration but you know what? An added benefit of being independent is that we will no longer have to put up with being treated like something on the sole of Westminster’s shoe. And I suspect today, even Douglas Ross finds that a really attractive proposition.’’