“You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”.

I forget the name of the New York Mayor who said this, but the line came to mind yesterday during the minor stooshie that developed after First Minister Humza Yousaf used the phrase “Tory Free Scotland” at the weekend in a speech ahead of the General Election.

If this was his poetry moment, it was more back-het cabbage than Burns. The phrase has been used many times in campaigns in a country – Scotland – that hasn’t voted in a Conservative majority since 1955. The phrase has always been taken to mean that Scotland simply doesn’t return any Tory MPs. And with the party polling at 18%, reeling from a racism scandal and with rumours of Rishi Sunak’s jaiket being on a shoogly nail, the scenario may well come to pass.

But the phrase became controversial because some people chose to see the phrase as a desire to remove all Tory ideology north of Gretna.

So let’s try to unpack some of this, starting with some recent history.

In 1997, the year of the Labour Landslide, the Conservatives returned no MPs in Scotland. Nada. Zip. So it’s been done before. But what makes it fascinating is that 1997 was also the year of the devolution referendum in which Scotland voted overwhelmingly to reconvene its parliament. The Tories campaigned against it, but in every election since, the d’Honte voting system we chose to use meant that the Conservatives won a significant minority of seats – and quite rightly so. So the irony is that the thing that they campaigned so vociferously against turned out to be the very thing that gave them relevance.

Secondly, in a sense a “Tory Free Scotland” is neither achievable nor desirable. There has always been a fairly strong strand of right of centre political thought here. It’s perfectly possibly to see the benefits of an independent Scotland while at the same time holding some centre right beliefs. These things are not mutually exclusive, and with the constitutional needle struggling to move much above fifty percent, we can ill afford to alienate folk whose different political outlook does not equate to support for the union.

And thirdly, there will be right of centre parties in a self-governing Scotland. The difference will be that they will be genuinely Scottish ones. In the absence of a union, there will be no unionist parties, just as in the absence of an independence campaign – because we’ll be independent – there will be no pro-independence parties. In short, there will simply be a number of parties whom we vote for and a government will be formed. We’ll be living in a normal democracy. Thank goodness. And who an independent Scotland chooses to elect will be fascinating – and possibly surprising.

So personally I’d change the message.

Not a Tory free Scotland – that’s just vacuous, grandstanding nonsense – but one that is free from Westminster governments of whatever political hue that we didn’t elect.

In other words, let Scotland, for better or worse, be Scotland.

Keep going people. I’ll meet you further on up the road.