A former senior Tory MSP has branded Boris Johnson a "fool and a clown" after he was fined for breaching covid lockdown rules in June 2020.
Professor Adam Tomkins, who represented the Glasgow region at Holyrood from 2016 to 2021, said the Scottish Conservatives are in "terminal decline" due to its stance over the partygate scandal.
With the local council elections across the United Kingdom set to take place on May 5 Tomkins said he expected voters to deliver a "withering" verdict on the Tories.
He also warned Tories in Scotland that having taken the "high road of principle earlier in the year", the party's stance on the matter now looked "not only empty but risible".
In March Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross withdrew his calls for Boris Johnson to resign over partygate. Ross was one of the first MPs to call for the PM to quit after he admitted attending a lockdown-breaking gathering in Number 10.
Writing in The Herald newspaper ahead of May's local government elections, the former MSP said: "I expect that the popular verdict on this pantomime of a performance will be every bit as withering as it deserves to be.
"There are some good, talented and principled men and women in the Scottish Conservative party but, yet again, the vehicle in which they insist on remaining is leading them badly astray."
He also said Scottish Labour could overtake the Tories to become Scotland's second party.
Tomkins added: "All Anas Sarwar has to do from here is to sit still and watch as Scottish Labour overtakes the Tories as Scotland’s second party and the principal opposition force to the SNP.
"The Scottish Conservatives are in terminal decline, again. And, this time, it is their own fault."
On the Prime Minister Tomkins, a law professor at Glasgow University, wrote: "This has always been the problem with Boris Johnson.
"He positively exudes the sense – he wallows in it, he glories in it – that the rules just do not apply to him. Rules are for other people. That may be fine in a clown or a fool (every Shakespearean court had one) but not in a ruler.
"Once Mr Johnson reached high office the Falstaff in him should have been banished, permanently and mercilessly (just as the old soak was, once Hal succeeded his father and became King Henry V).
"Boris Johnson, a great Shakespeare enthusiast, knows this well.
"But he has resolutely failed to act on it. Instead, he has presided over a culture in Downing Street that paid little heed to the lockdown rules the rest of us were struggling under and then – worse, in my view – sought to prevaricate, dodge, duck and dive when the evidence started to emerge."
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