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Frayed Union greets Johnson on Scotland visit


Boris Johnson’s first visit to Scotland as UK prime minister was intended to emphasise his commitment to its three-century-old union with England.

But mixed messages on the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit meant the trip was unlikely to allay fears among Scottish Conservatives that his premiership could be disastrous for the party and for UK unity. 

On Monday Mr Johnson sought to paper over deep differences with Ruth Davidson, the Conservative party’s Scottish leader, insisting that he was still aiming to avoid the kind of hard exit that she has warned strongly against.

On the eve of Mr Johnson’s visit to Scotland — which took in a trip to the Faslane naval base as well as Edinburgh for talks with Ms Davidson and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — the Scottish Tory leader warned in a newspaper column that she disagreed with his government on the issue of leaving the EU without an agreement. 

“When I was debating against the pro-Brexit side in 2016, I don’t remember anybody saying we should crash out of the EU with no arrangements in place to help maintain the vital trade that flows uninterrupted between Britain and the European Union,” Ms Davidson wrote. 

The warning underscored longstanding tensions between Ms Davidson, widely credited with reviving Tory fortunes in Scotland, and Mr Johnson, who is deeply unpopular north of the border.

Following talks, both leaders sought to downplay their differences with Ms Davidson stressing instead their shared opposition to Scottish independence. 

Ms Davidson’s only mention of a no-deal Brexit was to say that Scottish National party warnings on the issue were “hypocritical” because its MPs had voted against the withdrawal deal agreed between the EU and former UK prime minister Theresa May last year. 

Speaking earlier to journalists at the Royal Navy base in Faslane, Mr Johnson said he was confident a new agreement could be reached before October 31, the UK’s scheduled departure date. Recent contacts with EU figures had left a “very, very positive” feeling, he said. 

But the new prime minister also called for Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement to be revised and for “backstop” arrangements to prevent a hard Irish border to be scrapped, demands the EU has already rejected. And while hailing Ms Davidson as a “fantastic” leader of the Scottish Tories, Mr Johnson waved aside her worries about a no-deal Brexit. 

“It is right . . . to prepare for no-deal, and we are also going to be doing that very, very actively and with great confidence,” he said. 

Ms Davidson has in the past been highly critical of Mr Johnson, but signalled during his Tory leadership campaign that she was ready to work with him if he became prime minister. 

The Scottish leader pushed hard for her ally David Mundell to be retained as the UK government’s Scotland secretary, but Mr Johnson last week replaced him with Alister Jack, a little-known figure who was one of the few Scottish Conservative MPs to have backed leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum.

Mr Johnson also ruffled Scottish feathers with the highly unusual move of appointing an English MP as under-secretary of state at the UK government’s Scotland office.

While Mr Johnson has given himself the new title of “minister for the union”, many Scottish Conservative members are deeply concerned about the implications for UK unity of his premiership. A Panelbase poll in June found 53 per cent of Scottish voters would support independence if Mr Johnson was prime minister. 

Mr Johnson’s enthusiasm for Brexit goes against majority opinion in Scotland, which in 2016 voted by a margin of 62-38 per cent to stay in the EU. 

The new prime minister has also in the past repeatedly questioned Scotland’s relatively generous public spending, has dubbed the prospect of a SNP swing vote in the UK parliament “Ajockalypse Now”, and argued it is “not conceivable” for a Scot to be UK prime minister. 

“What he brings is the baggage from his entire political life, which is pretty anti-Scottish if you look at it,” Derek Mackay, finance secretary in the SNP government, told BBC radio on Monday. 

The SNP hopes to benefit from Mr Johnson’s unpopularity in Scotland, where the June Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times gave him the startlingly low approval level of minus 37. 

A crowd of independence supporters booed Mr Johnson’s arrival at Bute House, the official Edinburgh residence of Ms Sturgeon, and the prime minister took the highly unusual step of leaving after the meeting by the building’s back door. 

Ms Sturgeon said after the encounter that it had left her convinced that Mr Johnson was pursuing a “no-deal strategy” that would be hugely damaging. 

“Behind all of the bluff and bluster, this is a government that is dangerous,” she said.

Ms Sturgeon also accused Mr Johnson of a lack of chutzpah in avoiding any encounters with the Scottish public during his brief visit to Scotland. Apart from the meetings with the first minister and Ms Davidson, the prime minister chose to meet journalists in the tightly guarded Faslane base, home of the submarines that carry the UK’s nuclear deterrent. 

The secure location offered a sharp contrast to Mr Johnson’s public walkabout in Birmingham last week, but the prime minister insisted that on a recent visit as Conservative leadership candidate he had had “completely unhomogenised, unpasteurised” encounters with the Scottish public. 

“I was very warmly received by a hen party and many others,” he said.



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