IT is a classic scene from Breaking Bad. In the depths of the desert Huckster lawyer Saul Goodman finds himself staring into a freshly-dug shallow grave. Kidnapped by the masked Walter White and his associates, Goodman first negotiates his way to his feet, then past their loaded firearms, then out of this seemingly impossible jam. From a position of powerlessness, the shady patter merchant takes back control of the situation – and lives to litigate another day.

It is an object lesson in playing a weak hand well. Don’t panic, seize the initiative, take charge of the dialogue, get on a level of equality with your opponents, focus on shared interests rather than your entrenched, antagonistic positions.

Since the morning of the June 24, we’ve been hearing a good deal from the UK Government about how you ought to negotiate. And in a simple way, Theresa May’s approach chimes with conventional cultural wisdom about hard negotiating stances. For many folk, negotiations turn on whose spine buckles first. May has been striving – for the main part successfully – to convince the British public that hers is adamantine.

The UK Government is approaching Brexit like a life or death game of poker in a boozy mafia den, pistols at the ready. Seen through this lens, the savvy Brexit negotiator should be inscrutable, sleekit where necessary, and radiating suspicion across the negotiating table. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, after all. So mislead your opponents about your bottom lines, be vague about your real interests, privilege total victory over sustaining sound relationships in the longer term. And when the battle is joined? Stake out tough positions, defend them, and frown till your opponents crumble.

But until the smash, the watchword is: say as little as possible. Drop multi-coloured hints and gestures, but always maintain your room to manoeuvre. Since June 24 this year, Theresa May’s Government has thirled to this model religiously. Brexit still means Brexit. We have been given a jingoistic colour palette to govern the process – it’ll be “red, white and blue”, the PM says – but precious little else. Justifying the omerta, the PM had said that “we will not reveal our hand prematurely and we will not provide a running commentary on every twist and turn of the negotiations.”

Trade Minister, Liam Fox, plumbed even oilier depths of political cynicism, telling Tory Conference that he regards the 3.2 million EU citizens living in the UK – 173,000 in Scotland alone – as “one of our main cards in the negotiations” with European governments. This must be what Ruth Davidson had in mind, when she exhorted her colleagues not to forget behind discussions of numbers and rules and criteria for immigration, “there lies people and homes and families” who are “welcome here”.

On this, as much else, Ruth Davidson is now keeping conspicuously, biddably – mum. Hers is now a guilty silence, a dishonest silence, a silence which abrogates her responsibility to Scots to realise the best Brexit possible, even if that means hard conversations with her friends in Whitehall. In August this year, Davidson claimed she doesn’t “wear any masks” politically, boasting that she’s “never been caught out” in her many appearances in the media.

Well, there’s a first time for everything.

Once, Davidson maintained that she supported full participation in the European single market “even if the consequence of that is maintaining the free movement of labour”. Before the Brexit referendum, she was a fearless pugilist in Wembley Stadium, booting poor Boris Johnson in the kidneys again and again. Say what you will agin her, Davidson is a talented communicator. She was happy to preen over the good notices her performance received. But now, her once fiery convictions have – characteristically – evaporated under political pressure.

The First Minister had Davidson bang to rights in the Holyrood Chamber yesterday: “Ruth Davidson’s views might have more credibility, if they were remotely consistent with anything she said, either before or in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum.” Nicola Sturgeon countered: “remember that lion roaring, at Wembley Stadium, about how Brexit would be a disaster, about how people were not being told the truth, about how people deserved the truth? That roaring lion has now been replaced by a meek mouse, telling Scotland that it just has to accept whatever damage Brexit is going to do.”

That’s got to sting. In response, Davidson demands we now “pull together rather than pulling apart” – which seems to amount to giving the fumbling May a blank cheque to make appalling political choices, without being tasteless enough to point this out in public, to raise difficult questions, or to grumble disloyally. Constructive ideas are dismissed as canny separatist manoeuvres.

If yesterday’s antics are anything to go by, it is the Scottish Tory leader who needs to pull herself together. If they ever had any substance, Ruth Davidson’s proclaimed views on the EU are far closer to Nicola Sturgeon than to the wilder frontiers of her own party in Westminster and in Whitehall. The Ruth Davidson for a Strong Opposition Party may not care to admit it – it might be politically awkward – but the overwhelming majority of the Tory caucus in Holyrood campaigned to stay in the European Union. Like Davidson, they saw the benefit of our place in the single market. They once made – often eloquent – contributions to its defence. And now?

Now, the silence is deafening. Once, in Michael Gove’s phrase, Scottish Tories presented themselves to the public – however implausibly – “as Scotland’s protectors against what some people might have seen in Scotland as the wilder excesses of Thatcherism”. During the 1980s, the patrician wets in St Andrews House promised to hold the wilder excesses of the Government at bay. Today, under Thatcher’s attenuated shadow, the meek mouse of Scottish Toryism seems determined to capitulate without even token resistance.

I hoped for more from Ruth Davidson. I appreciated the self-deprecation. I once understood the charm. But the Scottish Tory leader’s reflexive unionism and lightweight, shapeshifting truculence is now the only constant of her compromised political persona.