Not for the first time Ruth Davidson has come to my attention. I have previously noted her resemblance to Benito Mussolini.

It struck me a while ago that she is largely responsible for the present mess that the UK Parliament has got itself into over Brexit. At the last general election – one in which the UK’s future relationship with the EU was the most important issue facing the country – her campaign consisted solely of insisting that the Scottish electorate reject any more unneccesary elections in the form of a second Scottish independence referendum. (The irony that that general election was itself totally unnecessary in that Theresa May had a perfectly workable majority and no need to bother the electorate seems to have been lost on Ms Davidson.)

The upshot, however, was that the number of Scottish Conservative MPs increased from its previous derisory level to 13. Given that Mrs May managed to lose Tory MPs in the rest of the UK this was something of a triumph for Ms Davidson. However its consequence was that rather than Theresa May losing power those 13 Tory MPs gave her an outside shot at a Parliamentary majority, with DUP help.

The outcome we all know. The Westminster Parliament has been unable to come to any agreement on what the future relations between the UK and the EU ought to be and all is chaos. Without those 13 Scottish Tory MPs there may well have been a different Government – under a different Prime Minister – and an orderly withdrawal from the EU might have been cobbled together. British politics would not then be in its present parlous state. And we have what is arguably another “unnecessary” election.

Yet, what lay in my post on my arrival back from holiday? (A holiday I might add in which my visits to Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Finland and Sweden showed a degree of civic engagement with the elections to the European Parliament sadly not in evidence in the UK in previous years to this – and given the lack of posters on lampposts round my area in this year too. A coincidental mayoral election in Rostock might have added to the interest there, though.)

Well there was a Scottish Tory European election leaflet barely mentioning Europe (if at all) but pleading for votes so as to forestall a further Scottish independence referendum. Ms Davidson it seems has only one tune. Her cupboard is bare. If it weren’t for the prospect of another independence referendum what on Earth would she campaign on? She has nothing to say on any other subject.

Since she has seemingly learned nothing and has forgotten nothing perhaps Ms Davidson is a Bourbon rather than a Mussolini.

What can you say about a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who derides Parliament? Who blames MPs for her failure to secure her desired legislation?

It is as if she thinks she is a dictator and that what she says must go. The tenor of her speeches – and her facial gestures – is exactly that of someone who does not tolerate dissent. Trying to suggest Parliament is against the “people” is a dangerous course. I have already suggested that May would be a dangerous PM but even I did not expect such an outrageous comment to come from the mouth of a British PM.

She has already shown many times she is unfit for high office – too rigid, too blinkered, among other things – but if anything proves it, that assertion does.

For that is not the system in which she works. Parliament is not there to do the Prime Minister’s bidding. MPs are not delegates bound to do what they are told. They are representatives, there to exercise their own judgement on the legislation put in front of them. Certainly, they are elected on a broad basis to support the policies of the party under which they presented themselves to their electors but not slavishly to troop through the voting lobbies like sheep.

They have a duty to assess whether any projected law is in the country’s interest and to vote accordingly. It follows that only those laws to which Parliament consents can be enacted. If Parliament does not give its consent the proposed law does not pass – no matter the Prime Minister’s wishes.

Theresa May’s statement that, “It’s a matter of personal regret to me,” that Brexit hasn’t been delivered yet irresistibly reminded me of Neville Chamberlain in his speech on the radio in September 1939 announcing that war with Germany had begun. “You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.”

Theresa May is not a martyr to MPs. She is the victim of her own folly. Her flagship policy has been defeated in Parliament – twice, by historic margins each time – and yet she still ploughs on banging her head against the brick wall of that same hung Parliament which only came into being because of her hubris in assuming all she had to do was call an election and then bask in the adulation of an adoring public and a landslide victory. Not the first, nor last, of her mistakes. And it left her held hostage to the extreme right wing of her party and to the provisional wing of the Old Testament in the shape of the Democratic Unionist Party.

What has to happen in order for this woman to recognise reality? That her time as PM has been a disaster, that she has brought about chaos, and harmed the country in the process. And for what? To keep the Tory Party together? It looks like that’s working well.

People in Britain used to make jokes about banana republics. That’s a bit out of date these days.

Except for the fact we don’t grow any we’re now the butt of any such joke. A banana monarchy.