Humza Yousaf has exposed the lie at the heart of Scottish nationalism

Do the Scottish Conservatives really want to get rid of Humza Yousaf? Vain, self-righteous and accident-prone, Scotland’s First Minister has become one of Unionism’s most valuable assets. In tabling a confidence motion against him, the Tories may be opening the door to a more competent SNP leader.

Support for separatism is not quite the same thing as support for the separatist party. Unionists sometimes vote SNP to give Westminster a kicking, or because their local candidate is the most credible Left-winger.

Still, it is hard to disentangle the rise of the independence movement from the demotic appeal of the last two SNP leaders, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. Whatever their disqualifications, they were exceptional campaigners. In a single generation, Scottish separatism went from being a kooky cause for kilted cranks to carrying all before it. Sturgeon took her party from six to 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats.

The odds of the SNP being led by a third strategic genius in a row were never high. But Unionists couldn’t believe their luck when the Nats plumped for Yousaf.

Only two clips of the cack-handed Ruglonian have penetrated the public consciousness, both dating from before his leadership. In one, he zooms down a Holyrood corridor on a scooter, his self-satisfied expression giving way to a look of fatuous horror as he realises he has somehow managed to topple over.

In the other, he rattles off a list of Scotland’s law officers, vituperatively spitting out their race each time: “The Lord Justice Clerk: white. Every High Court judge: white. The Lord Advocate: white. The Solicitor General: white…” Quite what is wrong with this in a place where 95.4 per cent of the population is white – and a higher proportion of the age-group relevant to those positions – he doesn’t explain.

Those two clips are Yousaf all over. Clouseau-like, he remains convinced of his genius despite one pratfall after another. He has a certain fluency. Hutchesons’, the Glasgow private school which he attended along with Scotland’s Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has a strong debating tradition. So has Glasgow University, from where he went straight into SNP politics.

But, unlike the amiable Sarwar, Yousaf still comes across as a woke student debater, smug, moralising and outraged.

His leadership travails neatly encapsulate the dilemma for a party that claims to be the authentic voice of Scotland, but that behaves like a Leftist fronde.

At the last Scottish election, the SNP fell just short of an overall majority and Sturgeon, copying New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, whose star was then at its zenith, decided to put together a grand alliance with the Scottish Greens.

The Scottish Greens have argued, among other things, for fishing, even of the recreational, catch and return kind, to be banned in some Scottish waters and for Hamas to be declassified as a terrorist organisation.

But what really did for the coalition was the Cass Report, which confirmed what sensible people already knew, namely that we had been far too ready to give puberty-blockers to confused children. The Greens saw the recommendations as a Right-wing provocation, and refused to accept them.

With months to go before the general election, the SNP’s Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, made a visit to Holyrood. Although we don’t know what he told his colleagues, it seems a fair bet that he warned them that any more identity politics would lead to a pasting at the polls.

In any event, Yousaf, who was singing the praises of the coalition until five minutes ago, decided that he should terminate the arrangement before the Greens did. The Greens responded by announcing that they would back the no-confidence motion.

Humza’s survival now rests in the hands of Alex Salmond – or, more precisely, of Ash Regan, who left the SNP to join Salmond’s breakaway party, Alba.

In last year’s SNP leadership contest, Regan came third with 11 per cent of the vote, behind Yousaf on 48 per cent and Kate Forbes on 41. Forbes, a committed Christian, had stayed away from the trans mania that was gripping SNP activists – a stance that cost her the job. Scottish Conservatives worry that she would take her party back to the mainstream. But does it want to go there? The question goes to the heart of the independence debate.

Scottish separatism is not based on linguistic identity, like Basque or Transnistrian separatism. If anything, there was historically a stronger ethnographic border between the Highlands and the rest of Great Britain than between England and Scotland.

How do you argue for partition when most people throughout the UK speak the same language, watch the same TV, eat the same diet, sing the same songs? Salmond and Sturgeon had an answer.

Scotland kept voting for Left-of-centre parties but ending up with Right-of-centre governments, they said. Achieve independence, and you’ll never have to worry about the Tories again.

This was true in its own terms. Industrialisation and de-industrialisation tend to create Left-wing electorates and, in Scotland, this tendency was reinforced by the Barnett formula. Successive secretaries of state, thinking that higher spending would kill separatism, ended up making voters even more dependent on state largesse.

But this phenomenon was largely limited to economics. Although the SNP has convinced itself that the Scottish character is uniquely kind, unselfish and welcoming of minorities, opinion polls show that Scots have similar views on trans, immigration and free speech as other Brits.

The SNP’s elevation of victimhood, and the associated suggestion that Scotland was somehow colonised by England, is preposterous. Scots were the original Unionists. If anyone felt colonised in 1603, as James VI made his stately procession through his new realm, it was the English.

Though some MPs on both sides of the border opposed the Act of Union in 1707, England was the more resentful, upset at absorbing Scottish debts. Scots went on to be over-represented in every aspect of colonial expansion, as soldiers, settlers, teachers, missionaries and administrators. No one ever called it the English empire.

Still, accurate or not, the readiness of the Nationalists to adopt the language of decolonisation and Black Lives Matter catches the mood. The long-term threat to the UK does not come from individual SNP politicians, but from the trashing of the British brand.

The original argument for the Union was that it would create the strongest country in the world. Which it did. Great Britain established a global hegemony and used it more benignly than any rival, seeding parliaments and property rights on far continents, abolishing slavery and defeating three attempts to unite Europe in tyranny.

Scots were at the forefront of all those things, not least those Highlanders who had been initially the most suspicious, the “hardy and intrepid race of men” who formed the merged army’s fiercest regiments.

These days, being hardy and intrepid is seen as “problematic”. That is the real driver of separatism. The Union won’t be cut down by the SNP; but it might easily waste away as shared pride in British patriotism is driven out of us by our universities and media companies. The SNP will simply be there to ransack the corpse.