Boris Johnson made an interesting point about Scottish devolution – what a mistake

The prime minister’s comment would have made a lively column but it was foolish for a politician to say it, says John Rentoul

The PM made his comments to the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs (AP)

Devolution of power to Scotland was “Tony Blair’s biggest mistake”. Discuss. It sounds like an exam question my colleagues and I would set our students on the “Blair Years” course at King’s College London. 

It is an important subject for historical inquiry. When the Labour government legislated for a Scottish parliament in 1998, the consensus was that it was the right thing to do. Opponents warned that it was the slippery slope to separatism, but the settled view of the Labour establishment, especially in Scotland, was that it would clip the wings of the Scottish National Party. 

Blair himself was unenthusiastic, but he regarded it as inevitable and sought to manage it, learning the lessons of what happened when the issue tore the 1970s Labour government apart. It did turn out to be a slippery slope – the consensus, of which I was part, turned out to be wrong – but most of that slide happened after Blair had stood down. The question our students have to answer now is whether resisting devolution would have made it more or less likely that the UK would be poised on the edge of breaking up 22 years later. 

Boris Johnson’s comment to the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs that it was Blair’s biggest mistake would have made a lively, if rather predictable, article when he was a highly paid controversialist for The Daily Telegraph. He might have concluded his column by quoting Blair himself saying that two of his biggest mistakes were the Freedom of Information Act and the ban on hunting. 

But it was a mistake for Johnson, whose job description as prime minister includes keeping the UK together, to call devolution a mistake. The crowd pleaser in Johnson couldn’t help telling northern Tories what they want to hear, which is that Nicola Sturgeon is the enemy and everything bad is ultimately Blair’s fault. 

“Devolution has been a disaster north of the border,” he reportedly said, before remembering that his own career had been built on Blair’s devolution of power to the mayor of London. According to The Sun’s report of the Zoom meeting, “Mr Johnson said he thought the Scottish parliament was a good idea during his time as mayor of London” but that he had now changed his mind about it. 

At 9.30 last night, two hours after his comments were reported, the prime minister changed his mind back again. Downing Street put out a statement saying: “The PM has always supported devolution but Tony Blair failed to foresee the rise of separatists in Scotland. Devolution is great – but not when it’s used by separatists and nationalists to break up the UK.” 

In other words: “He was talking rubbish and thinks the opposite of what he said.” It was almost as humiliating a U-turn as Jeremy Corbyn’s statement that, when he said the “scale” of Labour antisemitism was “dramatically overstated”, he meant “concerns about antisemitism are neither ‘exaggerated’ nor ‘overstated’”. 

Our students at King’s will be grateful to Johnson, however, for providing additional material for their essays on New Labour’s constitutional changes. Did Blair fail to foresee the rise of the independence movement? I think he was aware of the risk, but thought that it could be contained. What he could not have foreseen was David Cameron’s decision to agree to an independence referendum – again, winning it for the union seemed a way of putting a halt to the slide down the slippery slope, but the unintended consequences are still working themselves out. 

What Blair certainly failed to foresee was that by creating a directly elected mayor of London he would make a power base for a Conservative leader of the future, who would cause a bit of a disaster for himself by calling devolution a disaster.