As Boris Johnson should know better than most, divorces are always time-consuming, usually messy, and often bitter. So it is proving with the United Kingdom’s break-up with the European Union, after 45 years of uneasy marital life (ever-closer conjugal relations having long since been abandoned)...But, as they say, we must also think of the kids. In the case of this slightly stretched analogy – which isn’t meant to be condescending – that means Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It is not as if they could be, say, members of the EU on weekdays, and inside the UK at weekends. It’s tricky.

So the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has despatched the “minister for the union”, Boris Johnson, on a grand, but rather brief, tour to reassure the kids that no-deal Brexit will actually bring our family of nations together, and tighten for “the ties that bind the UK”, as he puts it.

Now he faces the toughest assignment of them all – Nicola Sturgeon, a thistle in human form. For Johnson it’ll be like an old time English comic turning up for a gig at the Glasgow Empire. As they used to say of the place: “If they liked you they let you live”.

For at least some of the time he will be accompanied by Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, and an uneasy partner since Johnson sacked her auld mate David Mundell, who officiated at her marriage. It will only add to the awkwardness of the situation, and I’m not sure Johnson’s routine, honed in the oh-so-English oxford union and House of Commons will go down so well with a Scottish crowd.

Boris Johnson's famous relatives Show all 11 1 /11 Boris Johnson's famous relatives Boris Johnson's famous relatives 1. King George II of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover (1683 to 1760) Boris Johnson is a Hanoverian, and, thus distantly related to the Queen, David Cameron (via William IV) and Danny Dyer (via Edward III), among others. Boris's paternal grandmother, Yvonne Eileen Williams, known in the family as "Granny Butter" and whose family name was de Pfeffel, was a descendant of Prince Paul Von Wurttemberg. The German prince was, in turn, a direct descendant of George II. Discovered by genealogists f other BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, Johnson commented, in 2008: "I felt I was the product of newcomers to Britain so it is totally bizarre, surreal in fact, to be told that in fact my Great x 8 Granddad is George II. But don't neglect the point that he shares that distinction with 1,023 others – there must be several thousand other people out there in the same position.” National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 2. The “Mummy of Basel”, Anna Catharina Bischoff (1719 to 1787) Last year, scientists in the Swiss city of Basel solved a decades-old mystery over the identity of a mummified woman. DNA extracted from the mummy’s gig toe indicates that the female is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson. The body was uncovered in 1975 while renovations were being done on Basel's Barfüsser Church, and was buried at the altar, wearing fine clothes, indicating she was at least well-to-do if not nobility. High levels of mercury in her remains suggested she had been treated for syphilis (the metal also helped preserve her). National Gallery of Basel Boris Johnson's famous relatives 3. Ali Kemal (1867 to 1922) (Pictured with wife Winifred Brun) For a man who made so much capital in the 2016 referendum on the prospect of Turkey joining the EU and its 80 million citizens thus enjoying free movement to the UK, Boris Johnson sometimes makes a surprisingly big deal of his Turkish Muslim great-grandfather on his father’s side, who he claims was an asylum seeker. Ali Kemal, according to his famous descendant, came to Britain because it was “a beacon of generosity and openness”. I t might be overstating it, but he did live in exile in England for a time. Unknown Boris Johnson's famous relatives 4. George Williams (1821 to 1905) Sir George, as he became, is the great (x4) grandfather of Boris Johnson, and was one of the founders of the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, in 1841. An evangelical apostle of “muscular Christianity”, George took it upon himself to organise some fellow drapers and establish a safe place for young men where they could be shielded from the debauchery and the temptations of the flesh and the grape. No sofas would suffer red wine stains in the hostel. Since then it has gone global, today assisting 58 million people across 119 countries, which is almost as many as Boris helps. A social visionary of his time, George was knighted for his works by Queen Victoria in 1894. National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 6. King Friedrich of Wurttemberg (1754 to 1816) Though stocky of build, and handy in a game of rugger, Boris Johnson is not especially heavy or tall. This ancestor was. King Friedrich stood 6 foot 11 inches, and weighed 31 stone (2.12 metres/200 kilograms). Napoleon remarked that God had created the Prince to demonstrate the utmost extent to which the human skin could be stretched without bursting. There are rumours that he was bisexual and enjoyed the close companionship of young noblemen. This added to the strains on his marriage to Augusta, who was the granddaughter of King George II. One of their four children, Prince Paul is the link to the Johnsons, via an illegitimate daughter he fathered in Paris with an actor named Friederike Margrethe Porth. Ludwigsburg Castle Archive Boris Johnson's famous relatives 7. Professor Elias Lowe (1879 to 1969) Elias is Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte’s great grandfather. The distinguished Princeton scholar and student of ancient scriptures (palaeographer) , Elias arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania in 1891, and was affine of Albert Einstein. Jewish, Lowe came for a line of revered rabbis. Although he cannot be counted Hallachially Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle makes him 5 per cent Jewish on their reckoning. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Boris Johnson's famous relatives 8. Helen Lowe-Porter (1876 to 1963) Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter. is Boris Johnson's mother Charlotte’s great grandmother. An American, she married the Lithuanian-born academic Elisa Lowe, and is said to have been probably the most prominent literary translator in the English-speaking world working from German to English in the twentieth century. However, not necessarily the best and in such circles her reputation is contested. In any event, she retained for 50 years the exclusive rights to translate the works of her friend Thomas Mann. Her and Elias’ daughter Beatrice is Charlotte Johnson (nee Fawcett’s) mother. Lowe-Porter family Boris Johnson's famous relatives 9. Sir Henry Fawcett MP (1833 to 1884) Before Boris and Jo Johnson became MPs and minsters, there was Sir Henry Fawcett – Britain’s first blind MP. He was the husband of the famous suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and thus an ancestor of Boris on his mother’s side - though the family tree isn’t clear on how close they are related. Glasgow University Boris Johnson's famous relatives 10. Prince Paul of Wurttemberg (1785 to 1852) Odd looking, an amusing womaniser (remind you of anyone?), this minor German aristocrat was the progenitor of the Johnson’s posh pedigree, such as it is. His affair with an actress is Paris, Fredericke Porth, gave rise to a daughter (out of wedlock as they used to say) provided the link back to the royal families of Wurttemberg and Hanover, and thus of Great Britain. By the same token it means that Stanley, Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo, and the rest of them along that branch of the tree, are also distantly related to most of the royal families of Europe including the Russian Romanovs – Johnson stands connected, albeit tenuously, to the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Luxembourg, Norwegian and Swedish families, plus the German Kaiser. Paul had five declared children, and two illegitimate ones, at least that are known about. National Archive Holland Boris Johnson's famous relatives 11. Fredericke Porth (1777 to 1860) When, on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? Boris Johnson discovered the identity of his 4x Great Grandmother, Fredericke, he was just a touch chauvinist: “An actress, could be a euphemism we may be about to turn up a prostitute here. Not that I mind. I want you to know they can get up to anything, my ancestors, they have carte blanche to commit whatever acts of fornication they want as far as I am concerned, but I want to know”. It seems Fredericke Margarethe was indeed an actress for most of her life, and was widowed by the time her illegitimate daughter, the product of her affair with Prince Paul of Wurttemberg was born, in 1805. Born Porth, Fredericke was married to a man named Vohs until 1804, and, in 1818, remarried to a man named Werdy. She was described as a “Royal Saxon Court-Actress”. Alamy Stock Photo Boris Johnson's famous relatives 12. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847 to 1929) Disappointingly, the ancestor who is sometimes mentioned as a stands as a standing genealogical reproach to Boris Johnson may not be a related at all. As a pioneering feminist and suffragette, she’d surely disapprove of Boris’ attitudes towards womankind. As President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the largest component of the suffragette movement, she did as much as anyone to get women into the political life of the nation, and the Fawcett Society, still fighting for equal human rights, is named in her honour. Millicent lived just long enough to see the vote being granted on an equal basis to all women, and said this when it was finally enacted in 1928: “It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.” Bain News Service/Elliott & Fry

It reminds me of an old story Ken Dodd told about a now forgotten light entertainment pair called Mike and Bernie Winters back in the 1960s: “Mike comes on to the Glasgow Empire stage playing the clarinet to an audience clearly suffering from terminal boredom. A few minutes’ later Bernie goofballs from the side of a curtain, causing a punter to scream out in anguish: “Christ, there’s two of them!”

Or maybe Johnson will emulate Doddy himself: “Anyway, I went on and said to the audience, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve sent for you.’” That was bold, Ken. And funny. “Then one bloke shouted: ‘What a horrible sight!’ and collapsed drunk in a heap. From that point on the audience were with me.”

Anyway, wee Johnson has something that no other Englishman encountering this hostile environment usually has, which is £300m in his pocket. This is his one trick, seen in Manchester at the weekend, which is to buy the popularity (ie votes) he so obviously craves. Many years ago, the emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, faced with a collapsing economy and a famine in the countryside took himself and his Cadillac to console his people, and passed bundle of banknotes to his flunkies to feed from the window, which was opened just a crack. A year later he was strangled to death after the communists took over in a coup d’état. The Scots have a similarly robust attitude towards being condescended to.

The more English the politician, the more the Scottish people resent the union, and the more chance of them voting for Scottish independence. The only thing that would prevent them from doing so is the notion that they’d be even worse off as a result. But then they might ask what is the point of staying in a union being run by this English numpty and his Aberdonian numpty mate, Michael Gove, who sits for a constituency in Surrey. Johnson is the most unwelcome Englishman to journey north of the border since William, “Butcher” Cumberland commanded the English redcoats at the Battle of Culloden, 1746 (a man to whom Johnson is distantly related, I can unhelpfully add).

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The polls confirm the impression that this posh-sounding Eton-educated, Islingtonian, MP for Henley and then Uxbridge, is the most “English” figure to lord it over them since Margaret Thatcher, the woman who enjoyed a relationship with Scotland of comprehensive mutual incomprehension. She treated the place like a sort of laboratory for mad ideas such as the poll tax.

Like every Conservative leader since 1955, the Conservatives have failed to win anything like a mandate to govern in Scotland. Having been wiped out entirely in the 1997 election, they’ve staged a mild and unwelcome comeback since, like TB, after the Scots had considered it eradicated. They voted against Brexit. I can’t imagine how few members of the Conservative Party there are in Scotland – maybe single figure thousands, and of those I can only guess how few voted for MacBoris the Brave.