Memo to Boris Johnson: "awesome foursome" doesn't actually rhyme properly in Scottish and Northern Irish accents

Just to return briefly to the subject of Boris Johnson's bizarre appointment of the MP for Worcester as a junior minister in the Scotland Office, I think we can gain a little sense of the warped thinking behind the decision in Robin Walker's own tweet about it.

"A huge honour to be made Minister for the union working with @BorisJohnson @ScotSecofState & @NIOgov - our precious union deserves to thrive through brexit & beyond. I will work with colleagues all across the UK to ensure that it does"

So he's not describing himself as a Scotland Office Minister or a Northern Ireland Office Minister, but rather pompously as "Minister for the Union" (which is supposed to be Johnson's own new title, as it happens).  You can imagine the conversation: "Here's a wonderful way to bring together all the parts of our precious, precious union.  Let's merge a junior post at the Scotland and Northern Ireland Offices and give it to someone who represents one of the other nations of our glorious United Kingdom."  They probably barely even noticed that the actual optics of that wheeze was to install an English MP as a colonial Deputy Governor-General of both Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Two servings of imperialism for the price of one.  Maybe they'd have got on a little better if they'd tried a Welsh MP instead.  We could have done a completely fair swap and put Ross Thomson in the Wales Office.

Incidentally, the magnificent irony of Boris Johnson's characterisation of the four nations of the UK as the "awesome foursome" is that the rhyme doesn't actually work properly in Scottish or Northern Ireland accents.  Most English and Welsh accents are non-rhotic, meaning that the letter 'r' is effectively silent in certain circumstances, and the word 'foursome' is pronounced 'fawsome'.  But Scottish and Northern Irish accents are rhotic (unless your name is Alister Jack) meaning that the 'r' is fully pronounced.  Absolutely everything about this new government is dripping in unthinking Anglocentricity - its vocabulary, its jokes, its gimmicks, its colonial appointments, and its dogmatic obsession with forcing through a No Deal Brexit against the democratically-expressed wishes of the people of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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There's a new article by Alasdair Soussi on the Al Jazeera website in which I'm quoted a few times - it's titled 'Could Boris Johnson be the UK's last Prime Minister?', and you can read it HERE.

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Marcia has provided figures from the first YouGov Scottish subsample since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, and on the face of it they're exceptionally good news for the SNP, and disappointing for Jo Swinson.  However, I'm going to ca' canny just for the moment, because I can't actually see any sign of the datasets yet.  (I may just be looking in the wrong place - the YouGov website is getting less user-friendly with every passing year.)

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Professor Roger Awan-Scully is known to millions as "the John Curtice of Wales" (well, that's how he's known to me, anyway) and he posted this tantalising tweet a few hours ago...

"A new Welsh Political Barometer poll by @YouGov will be published tomorrow by @ITVWales

The results go well beyond ‘gosh’ territory, or even ‘blimey’: by some way the most dramatic poll I have ever analysed.

And in some respects a genuinely historic poll for Welsh politics."

Given the Boris bounce that we saw in GB-wide polls last night, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he's hinting at a Tory lead.  But the thing is that the Tories have been in the lead in Welsh polls before, so in itself that wouldn't qualify as "the most dramatic".  So I'm wondering if we'll be looking at either an outright lead for Plaid Cymru, or Labour slipping to third place.

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UPDATE: Many thanks to Anon in the comments section below for providing the YouGov datasets, which confirm the subsample figures that Marcia gave us earlier...

SNP 47%, Conservatives 21%, Liberal Democrats 12%, Labour 11%, Brexit Party 5%, Greens 3%, Plaid Cymru 1%

This is the second YouGov subsample since Boris Johnson became Tory leader, but the first since he became Prime Minister.  That's a crucial distinction, because in GB-wide polls the Boris Bounce only occurred after Theresa May actually left Downing Street.  And sure enough, the Tory surge appears to have been replicated in Scotland - but not at the expense of the SNP, who are in an even more commanding position than usual.  What that would mean in Tory-SNP marginal seats is anyone's guess.

You wouldn't have expected the SNP to suffer directly from a Tory surge in any case - the greater concern would have been SNP voters drifting off to the Lib Dems.  That doesn't appear to be happening at all, although I remain of the view that Jo Swinson could yet be a small-to-medium-sized problem for the SNP.  People haven't really got to know her yet, but they will do courtesy of blanket coverage during the campaign proper, and that could be the danger point.

In case you're wondering why 1% of the Scottish subsample are backing Plaid Cymru, that's just one of the oddities that's sometimes thrown up by GB-wide polling.  It may be Welsh people living in Scotland temporarily, or it may even be people who selected the wrong option by mistake.