LAST Wednesday morning at the Conservative Party conference, a document was submitted to the Prime Minister’s team expressing opinions markedly different in tone to those of Home Secretary Amber Rudd the previous day.

Ms Rudd’s suggestion that businesses should be subjected to tests before recruiting more foreigners was bad enough but a subsequent media briefing that this might involve producing lists of names caused justified uproar. So the next day’s speeches would be more closely analysed than usual for evidence of support or disagreement.

Ruth Davidson was due to introduce Prime Minister Theresa May and, although her speech had been prepared weeks in advance, it was, as usual, still the subject of revision by the Scottish leader late into the night. After Tuesday’s events a key passage on immigration was not going to be watered down, no matter what the effect might be in the packed conference hall. Sending over material early enough for the contents to be digested but too late for changes is an old trick and, in contrast to Ms Rudd’s confrontational remarks, Ms Davidson’s main stage speech contained a defiant message of support for immigrant families.

And so, her voice cracking with passion, she said: “Let us not forget that behind discussions of numbers and rules and criteria, there lie people and homes and families. And for those who have already chosen to build a life, open a business, make a contribution, I say this is your home, and you are welcome here.”

It was a risk but it paid off and, as the week unfolded, more Conservatives came out to condemn the Rudd proposals, culminating with former Tory strategy chief and Leave campaigner Steve Hilton, who said: “It’s not just that the scheme is so obviously divisive and repugnant; it’s insanely bureaucratic … surely we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of bureaucracy from the EU only to see them re-imposed at a national level with a Conservative government churning out new red tape from London?”

The Spectator magazine had earlier described the idea as “bizarre, distasteful and alarming”, while former Tory MP Matthew Parris said: “How could May’s ministers think it’s OK to get people salivating about such fascist nonsense? The answer is not clamping down on all immigration, including the kind that actually helps raise living standards in the UK.”

By Sunday morning it was left to Defence Secretary Michael Fallon to try to clear up some of the mess by going on TV to emphasise that no names, only data, might be collected and the information wouldn’t be made public; as if that makes any real difference. The damage had been caused and there is nothing left to do but use the cover of consultation to ditch the idea. The call from chief Leave strategist Dominic Cummings for immigration targets to be abandoned and free movement for all but unskilled workers maintained may well be heeded.

No-one should kid themselves there are no Scottish communities where this would find favour. About 12 years ago when the Poles first started arriving in Scotland, I said to a senior Edinburgh Labour councillor how good it was to see people who had been kept behind the Iron Curtain freely coming here to earn a living. “Not in my ward it isn’t. They are taking jobs and undercutting wages,” she said. There is not much difference between that and Amber Rudd’s demand for a test to “ensure people coming here are filling gaps in the labour market, not taking jobs British people could do”.

Despite Ms Davidson’s clear position, the furore has allowed opponents to try to tar all Conservative supporters with a neo-Nazi brush. Typical is an old colleague, Scotland on Sunday’s Dani Garavelli, who at the weekend asked “What are you doing in the face of Tory hate-mongering?”

Me? Hate-mongering? Further, Ms Davidson was condemned as “happy to play court jester as warm-up act for the Prime Minister. Angling for a shot on Strictly Come Dancing, she seems overly preoccupied with her own profile to have a moderating effect on May’s excesses”.

As it happens, she’s already signed up for another appearance on Have I Got News For You. But Ms Davidson can only do the job she was elected to do, which is to lead the Scottish Conservatives. So she must be doing something right if the left-wing charge sheet extends only to wilfully speaking at a party conference, possessing an offensively high profile and failing to produce a compliant UK prime minister.

John McLellan is a former director of communications with the Scottish Conservatives.