WE’RE now in the closing stages of the Tory leadership contest. With turnout thought to be low, the surviving two candidates have spent the last few days engaged not in the high-minded activity of winning over hearts and minds by trying to bring their visions to life, but rather by sniping viciously at one another.

For these self-declared Unionists, promoting unity within their own party doesn’t seem to be very high up on their list of priorities.

Perhaps the apathy amongst the Tory grassroots membership about their next leader is unsurprising.

After all, the party’s MPs didn’t exactly leave them with an inspiring final two to choose between, meaning the contest comes down to a choice between a charlatan who will endorse any piece of right-wing lunacy in the hope it wins him support; or a candidate who is a true believer when it comes to much of that same lunacy.

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In Robert Jenrick, the Tory Party have found a lightweight desperate to sound like a heavyweight, and who comes with a trail of dodgy donations and ministerial decisions flapping in his wake.

In Kemi Badenoch, on the other hand, the party has a thin-skinned attention-seeking culture warrior who could start a fight in an empty room – and that’s only what her friends say about her.

Although you must always make allowances for the fact that given the choice, Tory members once opted for Liz Truss, you have to imagine that it’s unlikely they will make the same mistake of picking a cosplaying right-winger like Jenrick, when they could have what they regard as the authenticity of the real thing, warts and all, in Badenoch.

All of this is of interest to Scotland because of the possibility that, with England already tiring of Keir Starmer, whoever it is that ends up leading the Tories could within a few short years be sitting in Downing Street, quite possibly being propped up by and therefore beholden to the votes of Reform MPs.

(Image: Darren Staples)

So whether we like it or not – and like pretty much everyone reading this I certainly don’t – what Badenoch has to say when it comes to Scotland matters.

Martin Geissler gave us a foretaste of the combination of arrogance, ignorance and brittleness that Badenoch will bring when he interviewed her on The Sunday Show last week.

Pressed about her pledge to “reprogramme” devolution, she was unable to provide any details. All she could offer was to say: “I know that it’s not working. If something is not working, I can say I want to fix this.”

Badenoch makes much of having been an engineer, with a conceit of working from “first principles” and focusing on “root causes”. But it’s a poor engineer who tries to fix anything without first understanding what it is that is supposedly wrong; without knowing what improvement it is they are trying to make; or without having the most basic understanding of what the thing they are claiming to be fixing even does in the first place.

However, her real howler was when it came to the “voluntary” nature of the Union.

After stating her agreement with the idea that the Union was indeed one which was voluntary, when pressed on what the democratic route out of such a “voluntary union” would be, she then sought to argue that a voluntary union was not “one where everybody can rush out at a particular point”.

“It’s a union for all of the countries”, she says, “and not enough is talked about the Union in England, and I think that that’s wrong.”

So, just as the Unionist answer to the West Lothian Question is that you mustn’t ever ask it, we now have a clear and presumably honest expression that while of course the Union is voluntary, that’s only the case for so long as no-one ever tries to voluntarily leave it.

And with that, she becomes the latest in a long line of Unionist politicians – Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat – who seek to confuse their own personal lack of desire for a further independence referendum with the desirability of ever holding another such vote any time in future.

The trouble for Badenoch is – outside of a hardcore of Unionists – this kind of rhetoric plays very badly, not just among independence supporters, but also among people in Scotland who don’t support independence but who nevertheless recognise the democratic argument about the country having the right to become independent if that’s what people wish.

Goodness knows what similar clangers she will also drop if ever asked the same question in the context of Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement.

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That kind of unthinking, reflexive Unionism is or ought to be fuel for the independence movement, and the question that Geissler asked about leaving a voluntary union is the question that should be being put to Unionist politicians at all levels between now and the next election.

As independence supporters we may not agree with or always like the answers that are given, but every attempt to evade, avoid or dismiss the question can only act as grist to our collective mill and build support for our end goal.

The choice is ours as to whether we simply cry into our beer and the comments sections, or whether we start to use it as political leverage to persuade our fellow Scots.