Boris Johnson was out elbow-bumping bemused voters on the seafront in Hartlepool yesterday.
He wouldn’t have travelled there if he didn’t get the whiff of a chance that the Tories could pull another brick out of Labour’s red wall in the north of England by-election this Thursday.
But with another hop and a skip he would have been in Scotland.
If he had driven the short distance to Dumfries he could have ambushed Nicola Sturgeon’s visit to the town yesterday and tackled her on the Border issue which has become her Achilles heel in this walk-through of an election campaign.
It would have been the political encounter of the month for the self-appointed Minister for the Union to meet the soon to be reappointed First Minister on the borderlands of a country which looks set to return a pro-independence majority.
But no, fortune favours the brave and, when in it comes to political fights, Johnson is a coward.
He can bluster his way out of a paper bag at the safety of the Commons despatch box but his brand of posh populism, fake amateurism and pretend blundering freezes the blood in the veins of most Scottish voters.
So he stays away, frightened of the damage his actual presence here would do the union cause.
Johnson might be able to win in places like Hartlepool, despite his scandals and his handling of the pandemic, but in Scotland he’s toxic.
Yesterday’s man
Alex Salmond built his political career by taking the fight to his opponents.
He was never shy in taking on other parties when it came to getting his point across.
But now he’s out of government and out of the party he led for almost two decades.
Salmond has a new political party but lacks the platform he was once used to.
Now he’s claimed in a magazine profile of Nicola Sturgeon that he could have “destroyed” her career if he had wanted.
Language like this does the former First Minister no favours.
It smacks of being desperate for attention.
His detractors claim he’s yesterday’s man and Scottish politics has moved on without him.
Yet he could still be returned as an MSP at Thursday’s election.
Perhaps comments like that are the kind we can expect from him in Holyrood.
It’s the kind of debate that few people want to hear.
