Michael Gove and Boris Johnson know that if we leave the EU, Scotland leaves us - so what's going on?

“I am praying that we will wake from this sleepwalk to tragedy; and that the Scots vote no to divorce, and yes to Britain, the greatest political union ever," Boris Johnson wrote only two years ago

Michael Gove delivers a speech on the EU in London, Britain, 19 April 2016 (EPA)

My main problem with Michael Gove is that I cannot stay cross with him for long. There is something about that face, when the top lip is rigid with rage and the bottom one trembles on the verge of tears, that melts the heart.

This week, in the midst of his worst temper tantrum ever, you know you ought to be having a stern word. Yet one glance at that cute face and all I want to do is give him a cuddle.

The source of Govey’s bate is his disdain for something that would never happen to him here. He thinks he is being treated like a child - and not just he, but the entire public - by the pro-EU gang. He says that to scaremonger - as he accuses George Osborne of doing with the warnings of comparatively poor post-Brexit economic growth and a £36bn black hole - is to treat voters as “mere children”.

Since Michael is such an endearing chap, let’s try to coax him out of his strop by finding common ground. And one thing about which we can all agree is this: infantilising the public by treating them as easily scared kids before a referendum of historic importance is no way for any grown-up politician to behave.

Take another Conservative cabinet minister who, by spookiest coincidence, is also called Michael Gove. A Scot himself, and a fervent fan of our Union, this Bizzaro World Gove did what the other so despises. Before Scotland’s independence vote in 2012, he treated the voting public as mere children by trying to scare them in a most ridiculous way.

Scotland leaving the UK, said this Gove, would destablise not only Europe but the entire planet by empowering the Russian president.

“Think globally,” he advised. “Think what would happen if Scotland and England broke up. Do we think that Vladimir Putin would think, ‘Oh that's a pity’? Or would he think, ‘Ah look, the second principal beacon of liberty in the world is a little more unstable. That plinth has been broken. I'm in a stronger position to do what I want’?”

I’m not sure exactly how old someone had to be to buy this vision of Kremlin strategists plotting to recreate the Soviet empire on the basis that the people of Ecclefechan decided to tell the English to ecclefech off. But somewere between cutting a first tooth and starting at primary school seems in the ball park there.

Returning to our original Gove, that sworn foe of scaremongering, he currently plays the Boy Wonder of Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Caped Crusader. And, if anything, Batman Boris is an even more resolute enemy of scaremongering, comparing dire post-Brexit economic projections to the deranged hysteria about the Millennium Bug, and writing a Telegraph column headlined: “Don’t Be Taken In By Project Fear”.

Almost unbelievably, there are not only two Goves but two Borises - the one who will not brook fearmongering, and the other who wrote this in September 2014: “If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days’ time … a fundamental part of our identity will have been killed. We will all have lost a way of … explaining ourselves to the world. We are on the verge of trashing our global name and brand in an act of self-mutilation …” And so on, and so forth, until this heartrending conclusion: “I am praying that we will wake from this sleepwalk to tragedy; and that the Scots vote no to divorce, and yes to Britain, the greatest political union ever.”

Now how do you imagine the Scots will react if they vote to remain in the EU by a wide margin, as seems inevitable, but the UK as a whole votes to leave? How long would it be before the next independence referendum, this one certain to go Nicola Sturgeon’s way, freed them to begin petitioning Brussels for EU membership as the sovereign state of Scotland? A year? Two years? Three or four, at the outside?

However long it took, a Brexit win on June 23rd would create the deepest possible divide between the Scots and the English, thereby killing the Union - our union - stone dead the second the result was announced.

So what one of the Gove-Johnson teams are fighting so valiantly for is the very thing that the other is certain would - by empowering Putin to start World War 3, and by destroying all sense of national identity - be a cataclysm for this country.

There is a chance that I have been bamboozled by the clashing quotes above, and in fact there is only one set of each. But if that really is the case. why in the name of sanity are Gove and Johnson working to ignite the Scottish independence inferno which both of them foresaw, not two years ago, engulfing us all?

If either believes that this makes him any kind of messiah, we know otherwise. And the last thing you ever do with a very naughty boy is let him play with fire.