owards the end of last week, while the courtiers’ power struggle still raged at Downing Street, I had an exchange of texts with an ex-minister. What did this experienced politician think the increasingly fractious row in No 10 was really about, I asked. Was it personalities? Policies? Power? The instant reply was short and to the point. It consisted of a single word. It said simply: “Boris!” A few minutes later, the ex-minister followed up. The problem, he said, was the ultimately futile attempt of trying to deal with a dysfunctional person by endlessly discussing structural solutions. The same sort of thing had happened to New Labour at times. Now it was happening to the Tories too. A new chief of staff here. Bring in a new adviser there. A ministerial reshuffle perhaps. Before long, the ex-minister said dismissively, they will probably move the prime minister into a brand new room in the vain hope that a change of surroundings will solve the problem. Then, late last week, Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain walked out. A large majority of the Tory party breathed a sigh of relief at the end of what one MP called “the Dom reign of terror”. By Saturday morning, it suddenly seemed as though no one in the Tory party had a good word to say about Cummings. The end of Cummings-inspired disruptive campaigning and the rebirth of more orderly government under Johnson was widely proclaimed. There was excited talk in Tory circles about something described as a reset. Party activists needed one. The Tory press wanted one. Tory MPs of all stripes pressed for one. But there was a problem. It was called Boris Johnson. And anybody who was looking for an example of the enduring dysfunctionality of which the ex-minister had spoken did not have long to wait. It could have come over almost any big issue of the moment – Covid, Brexit, the US election or, this week’s green energy announcement. On this occasion, it came from Scotland. Cummings’s departure was widely welcomed among Scottish Tories, who have been beaten over the head over the Barnard Castle jaunt ever since it became known. But the problem for them is not just their association with Cummings but with Johnson too. Johnson’s own approach to Scotland combines indifference and insensitivity. He may have given himself the Gilbertian title of “minister for the union” last year, but he barely thinks about the issue from one month to the next. When he does, he commits his familiar fault of saying something un-thought-out and offensive, which he may or may not really believe. As on so many issues, there is no strategy at all. In the polarised politics of Scotland, just as in those of Northern Ireland before it, this is disastrous. Johnson is the SNP’s recruiting officer. The polls are tilting their way as a consequence. The new Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross gave a blunt warning about this undermining last month at the Tories’ virtual conference – his speech was a rare piece of hard truth telling for such an event. On Monday, Ross’s most senior adviser weighed in again. The Johnson government needed a “wake-up call” about what is happening in Scotland, said Kirstene Hair, speaking at a Policy Exchange event on “one nation” politics. The status quo was not working. Policies were being launched in London “without looking at the whole United Kingdom”. Ministers needed to be focused on delivering for Scotland as well. It was time to re-evaluate and rise to the challenge of nationalism. Johnson clearly wasn’t listening. His response a few hours later could hardly have been more destructive if he had tried. It is now more than 20 years since the Tory party overwhelmingly swallowed its doubts and embraced the devolution it had once opposed. The pragmatic approach is now a settled one. The important argument in Scotland is between devolution and independence, not between UK centralisation and devolution. But in his private online meeting with northern Tory MPs on Monday night, Johnson casually blew all that apart when he announced that devolution to Scotland was a disaster. The content was bad enough. The timing was utterly terrible. On Friday Scots Tories begin a virtual conference that is supposed to be an election launchpad. In six months’ time, Scottish voters will elect a new parliament in a contest dominated by the independence battle. Ross must have hoped that the departure of Cummings might start to clear some ground for a more unifying and unified Tory message. Instead he will spend the weekend firefighting the blaze that Johnson has ignited so casually. In the run-up to May, Ross will now be tarred relentlessly by the association with Johnson. All this might be comical if it was not simultaneously so serious. But the same slovenly destructiveness is familiar from many other instances in Johnson’s political career – and his journalistic one too. This week’s devolution debacle cannot be dismissed as a one-off, or indulged as Boris being Boris. It is the way he is. Covid has been the classic example for most of this year. We are about to get another demonstration of this as the end of the English lockdown approaches at the start of December. Johnson is not fundamentally a lockdown sceptic. He takes Covid seriously. He listens to the scientists. But he has now presided over two lockdowns while always giving the apologetic impression that they are annoying and even questionable, not a collective challenge to which he must provide leadership. The end of the second English lockdown in two weeks’ time is now poised to become another dysfunctional moment. As a result of his handling of Covid, he has diminished his political capital much faster than he needed to when the pandemic first struck. His ratings with the public as a party leader went from stellar at the start of the crisis to tarnished by the summer, and are still on the verge of being genuinely poor. Tory activists have travelled a similar curve, delighted at him after the 2019 election, still enthusiastic when Covid struck, but Johnson’s reputation, even on his own side, is now far adrift of the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. This may not be irreparable. Time is on the government’s side. And while Johnson himself may not be serious, his career certainly is. That record of successes cannot be dismissed. He has often prospered politically in spite of, and sometimes even because of, his slapdash character. As Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore put it this week: “With Boris, the nation must constantly confront the problem that a) he is alarmingly unsuited to high command but b) he has unique leadership qualities.” Yet as it approaches one major crossroads over Brexit terms, another over Covid and Christmas, and a third over the very cohesion of the country itself, Johnson’s government is looking rather the way he now looks himself – embattled and exhausted. An awful lot of the affection in the party seems to have evaporated. Instead, Tory party political exasperation is in the air, along with a suspicion that their leader may have been rumbled. That brief text I received last week may have got it in one. • Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist