RUTH DAVIDSON’S foolish haste in portraying herself as Defender of the Colours this week was wretchedly emblematic of what the Scottish Conservatives’ entire political strategy has become. No sooner had Scotland’s right-wing newspapers claimed (erroneously, as it turned out) that Nicola Sturgeon was engaged in an act of belligerent animosity towards the Union flag than the indefatigable Ms Davidson had raised the true blue ensign on social media. “The SNP government should be more concerned with raising standards, not lowering flags. Dismal stuff,” she tweeted.

Her colleague Murdo Fraser, who once bizarrely claimed on Twitter following a Rangers victory over Celtic that the Queen was only 11 years old, talked darkly of extreme elements: “Refusing to fly the Union flag on the Queen’s birthday is something that may well appeal to the extreme elements of the nationalist movement.” His colleague Iain Duncan Smith channelled his inner Jim Murphy and said that this was a “tawdry attempt to sow more division”.

It’s been revealed that flag protocol on Scotland’s public buildings had been altered eight years ago and that Nicola Sturgeon had nothing to do with it. One person who did have something to do with it though, was none other than her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth who might be expected to know something about flags and where to fly them. After all, Elizabeth owns a fair few palaces and castles and will have had to put out more than a few flags of a wide variety of colours for all the visiting panjandrums she receives on our behalf.

Her Majesty seems a sensitive soul and I’d expect her to feel embarrassed and awkward at the way she has been dragged into this unseemly contretemps. Why, only last month the petite monarch quite rightly withdrew the royal seal of approval from lingerie specialists Rigby & Peller after one of their directors revealed some of the secrets of Elizabeth’s foundation garments.

She’s done nothing to deserve this and I’d expect Ms Davidson to offer her a full and contrite apology for this jejune attempt at political point-scoring. And as Murdo Fraser is always so enthusiastic to apprise us of the Queen’s links to Scottish football perhaps he’ll be equally as eager to proffer his own apology like the good and loyal subject he so obviously is.

Ms Davidson, during her tenure as leader of the Scottish Tories, has proven herself to be something of a vexillophile. Three years ago she exhibited startling vehemence on social media to convey her unhappiness at the decision to lower flags on public buildings as a mark of respect for King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who had recently deceased.

Ms Davidson, in an indelicate moment that made you check how late in the evening she had sent her tweet, insisted that the flag tribute was “a steaming pile of nonsense”. Ms Davidson surely doesn’t need me to tell her that the House of Saud is our most important ally in the Middle East, a theatre where a single diplomatic indiscretion can have far-reaching consequences. Not least to the UK’s arms trade in which we lead the world in the pursuit of arming military dictators to the teeth with hardware, both legal and illegal. Those colourful chaps who appear at Tory fundraisers to ensure scrutiny of their arms deals is maintained at a safe distance and who pay £100k-a-pop to brush Boris Johnson’s hair will not have been pleased. Someone really ought to tell Ms Davidson that if she’s ever to make 10 Downing Street she can’t go around embarrassing both our royal family and that of one of our closest and most loyal allies.

Ms Davidson would like us to believe that patriotism matters greatly to her. The waving of flags for good or for ill seems to excite or appal her depending on which colours and emblems are on display. Both she and the party she leads in Scotland have spent much of the last few years decrying the SNP for using the Saltire as their own private property.

During the independence referendum she and fellow leaders of Better Together portrayed the Yes side as divisive and Scottish nationalism as a narrow creed that appealed to the base instincts of extremists. Her party and the wider Unionist movement were eager to suggest that nationalism encouraged ideas of Scottish superiority. This wasn’t long before Ms Davidson appeared atop a British Army tank waving a Union flag. Her identification with UK militarism was extended further still when she was appointed honorary Colonel of the Territorial Army, her former regiment.

As the Scottish Tories reaped a bountiful reward for Scottish Labour’s catastrophic decision to wrap itself in the Union flag so the media profiles of Ms Davidson took on a hagiographic aspect. She could do no wrong as a Tory revival in Scotland, once considered impossible now seemed to be happening. The Tories, unable to defend Westminster benefit cuts that targeted the residents of working class neighbourhoods, chose to introduce a darker thread into their politics.

There was a reason why some of these constituencies voted in Tory councillors at last year’s Scottish local elections. This had nothing to do with expansive community programmes, creating jobs or highlighting SNP weaknesses in education and health but it had everything to do with long-held tribal loyalties to the Union flag. In some neighbourhoods belonging to Britain and possessing an emotional attachment to the crown was deemed to be more important than escaping poverty. Nor was this a benign form of Britishness, but one heavily influenced by UKIP and its demonisation of immigrants.

The First Minister has already begun to extract apologies from those media outlets who accused her of tearing down the Union flag but she’ll be waiting an eternity if she wants one from Ms Davidson. Having successfully deployed the red, white and blue as a symbol of narrow, tribal, British nationalism she can hardly be expected to stop doing so now.

She is the Scottish lieutenant of a party that in England remains in thrall to UKIP’s anti-foreign and anti-European agenda and which is propped up by the Democratic Unionist Party, an organisation that wields the Union Flag as a symbol of British cultural superiority. Ms Davidson knew what she was doing and what would be achieved by shouting about lowering Union flags: dismal stuff indeed and sinister too.