With the young 'Matalan' army at the SNP conference

Unlike some of his colleagues, he doesn’t take these things personally. “When we come to make an offering for a second referendum …” he starts to say. I stop him in his tracks.

“Congratulations, you are the first person to say “referendum”.

Not very long ago, in the SNP’s moonbeams and unicorns era, the mythical “second referendum” would travel across this concourse, borne on hundreds of conversations.

“When do you think it will be”; “Do you think they’ve got a timetable for it”; “once Brexit has kicked in we should go for it”.

Amidst excursions and alarums the trumpets would sound and the forward detachments would sally forth in pursuit of the Holy Grail at the command of the lady who doth walk on ye water.

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You could have papered your kitchen wall with newspaper cuttings carrying Nicola Sturgeon’s latest declaration of intent on IndyRef2.

It was all a vast confidence trick, of course, designed to keep the party loyalists (and their membership fees) on the hook.

We began to realise this when some of the party’s refuseniks broke ranks and attempted to propose, you know, actual plans with real details in pursuit of the chalice.

Crucially though, they hadn’t been endorsed by the party Sanhedrin and so squads of the young Matalan army of activists would be dispatched to fill up the front rows to throw eggs and rotten fruit at the transgressors.

As you wander through the rooms and vestibules of this conference centre you become aware that the Matalan brigade have all but disappeared.

The SNP can no longer provide a meal ticket to a cushy number at Westminster.

Once, when the party had dozens of MPs, there was always the beguiling prospect of a research job at Westminster.

All you had to do was attach yourself to one of those politicians who enjoyed the favour of The Lady; offer to carry their bags at the big occasions and maybe fire out a wee Adele number at the SNP’s Conference Karaoke where the party payroll all pretended to be normal.

Then you would tweet something nasty about Joanna Cherry and Kate Forbes and it was Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your auntie for a job on the London payroll.

Following the electoral apocalypse on July 4 though, the SNP gravy train has lost a few carriages.

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And so the young malevolents have fled towards those third-sector agencies where the party’s cultural and identity writ still runs lucre-laden and free.

The mood throughout the day is subdued, perhaps as a consequence of the older age profile. These halls would be hoaching once with happy, shiny, avid faces hurrying to secure an early seat at the keynote speeches.

Queues would form. Now, you’d see more people queuing up for a signed copy of Pete Wishart’s referendum memoirs, working title, ‘The Last Slipper’.

You could expect a rude rebuke too. “Your column was sh*te last week, McKenna,” or “have you been on the electric smarties?” You lived for these moments; they offered proof of life and were usually accompanied by a grin.

Today, there is no optimism; no sense of being in the foothills of destiny. How could there be?

The SNP lost hundreds of thousands of votes on July 4 and nothing the party leaders have said since conveys the impression that they think they did anything wrong.

This is like a Battle Re-enactment Society dressing up in medieval finery and brandishing toy swords.

They all know there will be no second independence referendum in the foreseeable future and that most of them won’t be around if it were ever to come around once more.

And so they try as best they can to replicate the old struggles when they were living their best lives.

In the media room we gather for “The Huddle”. This is when the ladies and gentlemen of the print and broadcast media are favoured with a pre-arranged visit from this year’s First Minister, John Swinney.

The journalists are primed with questions that might chivvy out the following day’s splash.

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It’s Mr Swinney’s task to duck and dive his way through the fusillade without losing his footing.

He does so rather admirably, fencing away questions about the inevitability of austerity and describing Labour claims to have been surprised by the financial black hole to be “baloney” (he wants to say ‘bollocks’).

Only once does he get exasperated. This is when he’s asked about a tweet by Joanna Cherry in which she says that the party is “in denial” about the General Election evisceration.

“Do I look as though I’m in denial,” he asks us.

No, of course not, John; you get paid handsomely to talk about the people’s priorities and delivering for Scotland and mitigating yet another UK’s administration’s perfidy.

Ms Cherry has elected not to attend this year’s conference and so, I arrange to meet her for coffee offsite, down near Haymarket station.

“What did you mean about the party being in denial,” I ask her.

She tells me about a conversation she’d had with Stephen Flynn, not long after the Aberdeen South MP had seized the leadership of the SNP’s Westminster group last year.

Ms Cherry had been cast into the outer darkness by Mr Flynn’s predecessor, Ian Blackford: this being the inevitable consequence of Nicola Sturgeon’s long-held hostility towards her.

“He told me he’d be restoring me to the front bench and then went back on his promise.

‘The party isn’t ready for that yet, Joanna,’ he’d said. It was clear that he’d been warned off by a small group of my most implacable enemies in the group.”

I mention four names and she nods at each one. “For so long as the party fails to deal with the targeting of independent-minded women they’ll remain in denial.”

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Earlier, Mr Flynn had delivered a half-hour statement of the bleedin’ obvious in the venue’s main arena.

This was the main item on the day’s agenda, but there were yawning gaps among the faithful. Mr Flynn is an impressive speaker, but offered little more than soundbites: we need to “listen”; we need “to act”; we need “to change”.

He saluted all those former colleagues who lost their seats in July. “The result was no reflection on their individual work - it was a consequence of circumstances beyond their control,” he said.

They had done “this party proud”. And then he said this: “In the often hostile environment of Westminster, they were Scotland’s voice and they were a voice to be reckoned with.”

To borrow Mr Swinney’s phrase, this was baloney.

Many of those who lost their seats were exposed for spending much of their time as MPs orchestrating attacks on their colleagues and becoming overfamiliar with Westminster’s baubles and folderols.

They literally took Westminster’s short money and did nothing to advance the cause of independence.

Mr Flynn then took his political career in his hands by praising Joanna Cherry (though not by name, for her name can never be mentioned).

He cited her success in “stopping Boris Johnson’s illegal lockdown of Parliament”.

Yet, looking around the hall, many of those who had piled in to silence her and Joan McAlpine and Ash Regan and to heap calumny on Kate Forbes are still there.

And if they weren’t actually participating in the witch-hunts they sat and watched and stayed silent. This is what denial looks like. And sheer, supine cowardice.

On each of the pillars surrounding the main auditorium there was a mission statement: ‘Growing Scotland’s economy’; ‘Ending child poverty’; ‘Protecting our NHS’: all very laudable and worthy.

But having failed to do any of this in 17 years of Holyrood government, what did they now have up their sleeves to ‘change’ it?

Perhaps, when Neil Gray finishes his quest for Oasis tickets we’ll find out how he plans to “protect our NHS” at least.