When Boris Johnson resigned just over two years ago, it seemed like a setback for the independence cause, because he was regarded as the best recruiting sergeant we could ever have. But I and others believed that there was one remaining hope. In Liz We Trussed. If Truss rather than Sunak won, there would be a potential Thatcher-like figure in Number 10 who would be electable in England but loathed in Scotland, which might just be the decisive factor in pushing Scotland towards independence - just as Thatcher herself had been decisive in transforming the slender pro-devolution majority of 1979 into what John Smith famously called "the settled will" of the early-to-mid 90s.
Of course what none of us anticipated, and in fairness there was no way we could have anticipated it, was that Truss would literally prove to be the most hapless Prime Minister in British history, would bring the economy to the brink of collapse within a month-and-a-half, and would single-handedly make a Labour government in 2024 a nailed-on certainty, thus allowing Scottish Labour to ride the momentum and narrowly defeat the SNP. In retrospect, the Truss victory in the 2022 leadership election was not only bad for the SNP and the wider independence cause, but worse than we could ever have imagined.
So it's obviously dangerous to be too confident in any assumptions we make about knock-on effects from the current Tory leadership vote. The opposite of what seems obvious could easily prove to be true. But for the fun of it, let's have a go anyway.
For reasons that are probably self-evident to regular readers, I haven't been paying as much attention to the vote as I normally would, and I've been a bit puzzled as to why Robert Jenrick has emerged as a strong favourite with the bookies. I know he's topped the MPs' ballots, but that shouldn't really matter if Kemi Badenoch is the darling of the membership in the way we were told until recently. But if the bookies are right and Jenrick wins, the Tories are going to move into space associated with the far right. I had wondered if some of his extremist rhetoric was designed to win the vote and he would tack more to the centre thereafter, but I watched his video about the ECHR earlier today, and he hasn't left himself any wiggle-room at all. It seems clear he would turn the Tories into a "leave the ECHR, no ifs, no buts" party.
Now, that only matters if he's capable of winning a general election. My verdict on Jenrick's video is that he has that kind of generic Tory 'slimy toad' speaking style that makes my flesh crawl, but then I'm not really his target audience. He does have fluency, he does have confidence. He could potentially win back a lot of voters from Reform without necessarily alienating the voters who stuck with Sunak in July, and that's all he'd really need to do unless Labour can get back to the sort of popularity they haven't had since 2017 when they took 40% of the vote under Jeremy Corbyn. At the moment that's hard to imagine.
It's just conceivable, then, that Jenrick could become Prime Minister in 2028 or 2029 and that Britain really could leave the ECHR. What would be the reaction of moderate, pro-European No voters in Scotland? They reluctantly reconciled themselves to Brexit, but would they really be so sanguine about Brexit II: This Time It's The Kitchen Sink? It would be an extraordinary opportunity for the independence movement, essentially an unexpected second chance for us to take advantage of the golden opportunity we somehow managed to squander in 2016-19. But the SNP would need to have the right leadership and strategy in place.
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