It was slightly comical and/or grotesque last night to see so many Labour people on Twitter queuing up to celebrate – literally celebrate – Rishi Sunak’s likely coronation as Prime Minister. They apparently thought the SNP would be gutted by the fact that we’re not getting the return of Boris Johnson. Well, I don’t know what the SNP leadership are privately thinking, but as I’ve been saying for days, the political realities have changed out of all recognition during Liz Truss’ ultra-brief tenure and it is simply no longer the case that Johnson is/was the ideal Tory leader for the independence cause. What previously made him such an asset was that he gave the Tories popularity in England but left them deeply unpopular in Scotland – thus meaning voters could see that independence was the only way out. Sunak is now our best hope for replicating that former balance, and these Labour armchair commentators may soon think they should have been careful what they wished for.
However objectionable he may be for a variety of reasons (personally I’ll never forgive his ideologically-driven hostility to anti-Covid measures), Sunak is the only leading Tory who is regarded as a credible figure by voters in England, particularly on economic matters. He is thus the only person who might just about be able to drag his party back into the game south of the border. There’s far from any guarantee that he’ll do that – it may be a task beyond the capabilities of anyone. But if he does, Labour in Scotland may no longer be able to ride on the coat-tails of their party’s momentum in England, and the prospects for a plebiscite election may look pretty decent.
But is the flipside of the Sunak effect in England that we must also accept he’s the most likely person to revive Scottish Tory fortunes and win them seats? I’d have been far more worried about that if he’d won the last leadership contest a few weeks ago. In the intervening period, the Tory brand in Scotland has been tarnished to the point where the party is now loathed as much as it was in the late 1980s and 1990s. Even a vaguely respected leader will only be able to limit the damage in Scotland at the next election – any notion of getting back to 2017 levels of support is now pure fantasy. So that’s what I mean when I say Sunak is best placed to get us back to the optimum situation of Tory popularity in England and Tory unpopularity in Scotland. If his relative charisma and relative competence ends up saving his party two or three Scottish seats, that’s a fairly marginal downside in the overall scheme of things.
Furthermore, if Johnson had won, an early general election could have been on the cards, due to Tories defecting or resigning the whip. That would have given the SNP leadership an excuse to back off from the plebiscite election plan and the independence cause could have been left to go into drift after any defeat at the Supreme Court. They will now have no such excuse, because the likelihood is that the election will be held in 2024, well after the Supreme Court ruling. (In spite of what some people would have you believe, there is essentially no chance of the election being as late as 2025, because no Prime Minister voluntarily holds a national vote in January. The latest likely date in the real world is October 2024.)
