AS the UK Tories were herding the first group of asylum-seekers onto a prison-ship, Penny Mordaunt was accusing the SNP of basing its independence campaign on “real bile and hatred”. The irony will be lost on her.

Previous interventions and her own Commons voting record indicate that she thinks a floating barge barely fit for human habitation is too good for the scraps of humanity seeking refuge here. In an updated version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch she’d be the one saying: “Floating shoe-box and fire hazard with two adults to a room you can barely swing a cat in? Luxury.”

Within the Westminster Tories, in ascending degrees of blimpishness there’s the common-or-garden right; the hard right; the Jacob Rees-Mogg hang-the-blighters-high right … and Penny Mordaunt.

During the Brexit campaign she had claimed that the UK would be unable to stop Turkey joining the EU. It was a vicious little intervention designed to appeal to the racist instincts that characterised the entire Leave campaign. Then-Tory leader David Cameron was compelled to correct her. “Let me be clear,” he had said. “Britain and every other country in the European Union has a veto on another country joining. That is a fact.”

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Her Commons voting record channels Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. “Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas.”

She’s always advocated more diligent enforcement of immigration rules and opposed the right to remain in the UK for EU nationals. She’s for mass surveillance of the rest of us for any sign of social malfeasance and feels that helping the long-term unemployed into jobs using public money is too good for them. She views any sign of geo-political turbulence as training exercises for the British armed forces.

In Scotland, we’re apt to be unkind about the low calibre of some of our politicians. And then Penny Mordaunt opens her mouth. She’s a walking, talking advert for independence.

Ms Mordaunt’s unhinged defamation of the entire Scottish independence campaign was, like her Brexit intervention, entirely without evidence. On social media many of us are too quick to describe as a lie that which is merely wrong or inaccurate. There is though, no other word to describe Ms Mordaunt’s description of the independence campaign.

It recalls the untruths at the heart of Better Together’s near-calamitous No campaign during the 2014 independence referendum. Then, a host of Unionist politicians led by Ruth Davidson and her Scottish Labour glove-puppets had described the Yes campaign as nasty and divisive. They claimed that it was responsible for ripping apart families which, until then, had co-existed in a fugue of peace and harmony.

Thus, while the Unionist parties were professing to “stand up for Scotland” they spent the entire referendum campaign telling the world that the country they purported to love was a land of savages who couldn’t be trusted to behave civilly at a referendum. It was left to the UK Electoral Reform Society, who had monitored the campaign and vote, to praise the independence referendum as setting a “gold standard” in political and electoral engagement.

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Yet, while the SNP will doubtless feed off Penny Mordaunt’s bouts of verbal incontinence they ought still to be vigilant. No one with any grip on reality would suggest that the Yes movement has ever been anti-English. Many in the SNP’s Westminster group have forged mutually respectful relationships across tribal lines at Westminster. And a glance at Alex Salmond’s roster of guests in his The Ayes Have It Festival Fringe debates reveals the cream of the English Unionist political and media establishment. The party. though, should be vigilant for the malignancy within its own groups at Westminster and Holyrood which has previously targeted its own. Prior to the Nicola Sturgeon era the SNP was blessed by a genuine spirit of unity based on family ties stretching back generations.

Within a few short years, though, this party, with the tacit approval of the leadership, had been hollowed out by a pack of lumpen Sturgeon appointees. Their defining characteristics were unquestioning loyalty and an eagerness to hunt down and destroy the careers of those who dared to question her agenda.

The extent to which her successor, Humza Yousaf can remove the toxicity which had lately contaminated the SNP will be a determining factor of his leadership. The early signs have been positive. As one party activist put it to me recently, “The adolescents have been told in no uncertain terms to cut out their playground antics.”

Mr Yousaf’s recruitment of the much-respected Kevin Pringle as his chief advisor is a giant step in the right direction. Meanwhile, the party’s recently-appointed Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn has already begun to foster a much more equitable atmosphere inside his group of MPs. When I interviewed Mr Flynn last week he was keen to stress this, even to the extent of expressing the hope that the exiled Angus MacNeil’s dispute with the party could be settled amicably.

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Mr Flynn told me: “You can disagree without being disagreeable. I do disagree with people internally and externally but I try to do so in a way that’s civilised. I want them to all know that they can have different views and that they can come and speak to me about it at any time.”

The forthcoming by-election for the vacant Rutherglen and West Hamilton seat will probably come too soon for a party undergoing an intense period of transition and self-reflection. And, until the police investigation into the SNP’s finances is concluded one way or another they are in a state of stasis: unable to move beyond the remarkable events of the last few months until they know the final bill for the damage.

On Thursday lunchtime, though, the rest of us will have an opportunity to assess for ourselves if Mr Yousaf and Mr Pringle have been successful in their efforts to draw the poison within. That’s when Joanna Cherry will make her long-awaited appearance on stage at The Stand venue for an in-person event with the journalist, Graham Spiers.

The Stand has already issued unprecedented security advice for those attending the show in expectation of protests from trans activists – some of whom have previously used threats and intimidation to silence gender-critical feminists. Among their ranks in the last few years have been a significant number of characters on the party pay-roll. It will be interesting to note how many of them – if any – will be there on Thursday.