FOLLOWING the publication of the long-awaited Sue Gray report, or at least parts of it, Boris Johnson gave a “sorry, not sorry – I've looked in the mirror and decided to blame my staff” performance in the Commons. 

Ruth Davidson gave a tearful interview to Channel 4 News, upset and disgusted by the degradation and dishonesty of the Johnson administration. But not upset and disgusted enough to renounce the peerage that he awarded her.

Ruth Davidson is peculiarly selective about what to get upset about. She never shed a tear for the women humiliated and degraded by the rape clause, she was markedly unmoved by the families forced to walk to foodbanks because of the removal of the £20 per week uplift in Universal Credit.

But now, faced with the potential destruction of a Scottish Conservative Party whose leader is in the untenable position of calling unfit for office a Boris Johnson who is not going to leave office without a fight, all of a sudden Ruth Davidson has discovered how to emote. 

She's crying for the rapidly diminishing prospects of the Scottish Conservatives and a so-called Union which is rapidly running out of time. She's crying because she and her fellow Anglo-British nationalists can no longer scream at the First Minister to get on with the day job, because they have saddled us with a British Prime Minister whose day job is downing bottles of wine and M&S party food as he ignores the red boxes abandoned at the door of his flat.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that we learned from Ruth Davidson's teary interview was that she talked to her constituents when she was an MSP. It can't have been at any of her surgeries.

Back in December 2019, Davidson spoke very differently about Johnson. She told the Daily Mail that she was backing him as the man to get Brexit done and to resist another Scottish independence referendum. She was happy to saddle Scotland with this vain, corrupt and self-serving creature when she thought that he would cement the Conservative Party's grasp on power.

Johnson was not any less of a corrupt and entitled narcissist when she gave him her backing, and Davidson and her Tory cronies knew exactly what sort of man he was, but she and Douglas Ross still lauded him to the press. The only difference now is that Ross and Davidson fear that Johnson has become a vote-loser, and the Scottish Conservatives are in the impossible situation of having a UK leader that they themselves have called unfit for office – a situation which they created with their own mendacity.

Still, at least Davidson has belatedly recognised just how toxic Johnson is, even if her new-found revulsion is entirely transactional and self-interested. It's still more than can be said for Alister Jack, the Sinecure of State for Scotland, who continues to support Johnson. 

The Scottish Tories are now riven from the very top, and estranged from the UK party. They can either do nothing and prove that they are lightweights, secede and put themselves in the embarrassing position of supporting independence for themselves but not for anyone else, or more likely hide away in the hope that Johnson will be unseated sooner rather than later by English MPs – a tactic which will only prove how spineless, ineffective and toothless the Scottish Conservatives really are. 

It's because her party is faced with those stark choices that Ruth Davidson was crying her crocodile tears. She's only crying for herself.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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