Boris Johnson is still PM and he’s back in Scotland – to the dismay of his party and the delight of the SNP

The prime minister addressed his disloyal party in Aberdeen, writes John Rentoul, and some of them even clapped

Their UK leader has risen, Lazarus-like, from his political deathbed to address the mourners around him (Getty)

Boris Johnson arrived at the Scottish Conservative Party conference in Aberdeen like someone turning up at his own funeral. Douglas Ross, the Scottish Tory leader, had pronounced Johnson’s premiership dead in January, signing a letter to Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, requesting a vote of no confidence in the party leader.

He was joined by 26 of the other 30 Tory members of the Scottish parliament (Ross is a member of both parliaments), who also called for the prime minister to resign, although actually getting rid of him is a matter for Westminster MPs alone.

They thought he was probably on the way out, and that they were safe in getting ahead of events by supporting what was likely to happen anyway. Naturally, they also had a big incentive to get their distancing in early, because Johnson was so unpopular in Scotland.

Now they look foolish, as their UK leader has risen, Lazarus-like, from his political deathbed to address the mourners around him. “The middle of an international crisis is not the time to be discussing resignations,” Ross said last week as he withdrew his letter to Sir Graham.

The prime minister even managed to win some applause from the conference by saying, in the oil and gas capital of Scotland, that we needed to “make sensible use of this country’s hydrocarbons” to avoid having to rely on Putin’s overpriced fossil fuels.

Still, it’s nothing personal. This is business; specifically, the business of the May local elections, in which the Scottish Tories are fighting to defend the council seats they won in 2017, which was a good year for them – until later when Theresa May’s general election campaign went wrong.

The Scottish National Party is likely to make gains. They would like the prime minister to visit Scotland every day between now and the elections. As the architect of Brexit and the embodiment of Englishness, he is the party’s ideal opponent.

Gains in the local elections are essential to the story the SNP tells itself of unstoppable progress towards its goal of independence. But it is a story that depends increasingly on an illusion of progress, when the true story of Scottish politics is one of stasis. The SNP and the cause of independence, led by Nicola Sturgeon, one of the best politicians in the UK, has stalled.

The immovable fact of Scottish politics is that Sturgeon cannot force another referendum. It is not just the convenient pantomime villain, Boris Johnson, who refuses it. Any likely replacement for Johnson – Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Keir Starmer – will refuse a referendum as long as there isn’t overwhelming support for independence in Scotland.

And there isn’t. The SNP failed to win a majority in the Scottish parliament last year, relying on the Scottish Greens to make up the numbers for its claim that a majority of MSPs supported another referendum, while the share of the vote was split 50-50 between unionist and pro-independence parties. A Savanta ComRes poll of Scotland yesterday found 52 per cent opposed to independence and 48 per cent in favour – and a clear majority who thought that now was not the time for a referendum.

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Even with Sturgeon leading them, and even with Johnson on the other side, the forward march of the SNP has been halted. Maybe it will resume again, but I think the chances are that the UK will have a better leader after Johnson and the SNP a worse leader after Sturgeon.

And I think that what is striking about the SNP since it lost the 2014 referendum is that it has made no progress at all on the difficult questions that decided the voters against them then. The party still doesn’t know what it would do about the currency, or how it would plug the gap left by the end of UK-wide revenue sharing, or how it would manage a trade separation over the border with England that would be several times more disruptive than Brexit.

I hope the cause of independence stays stalled for ever. I don’t want my country to be broken up, and I now dare to believe that it won’t be.