IT was the start of the election campaign that Nicola Sturgeon had always dreamt of: being abused by Katie Hopkins. Reputation Management specialists spend millions each year trying to rescue their more unruly clients. A crucial plank of their strategies is to get the verbally incontinent Ms Hopkins to abuse them in the yellow press. “He can’t be all bad if Katie Hopkins is having a go at him.”

The campaign in Scotland for the 2017 General Election shouldn’t cause the First Minister too many sleepless nights. Thanks to the deficiencies of her main adversaries Ruth Davidson and Kezia Dugdale (as well as the indefatigable Ms Hopkins),it has indeed been a carefree start for the SNP. The Scottish Tory leader has still failed to shut down the anger caused by her support for the Rape Clause. First, she refused to distance herself from it then she hid behind her spokesperson in defending it; then she tried to blame the SNP. At the end of the week she was still digging away there, obviously not yet satisfied at the width and depth of the hole she had jumped into.

Her clumsiness and sheer bad judgement on this issue has overshadowed the Tory campaign launch in Scotland. In truth though, the opening of the St Bonaventure annual Sale of Work would have overshadowed the Scottish Tories’ manifesto launch. For it’s now clear that the party in Scotland will campaign around one single issue: No second referendum. This neatly dovetailed with the strategy of the Prime Minister, Theresa May. Thus we have a UK leader who has called a General Election because she says that Parliament is getting too troublesome for her liking while her Scottish lieutenant wants to restrict the democratic choices of the nation’s electorate.

We can only guess at what is going through the mind of Labour’s Scottish leader, Kezia Dugdale. At any other time in this nation’s recent political history a Labour leader in Scotland would be approaching this election salivating at the prospect of putting the Nationalists back in their place and knocking the Tories back into the folds of history. Sporadically over the last two years she and some of her more articulate MSPs (there aren’t many) have made the First Minister squirm over her party’s failure to reduce educational inequality in Scotland and the managerial chaos at the top of the NHS in Scotland. The Labour leader, though, has undermined all of it by insulting Labour’s most loyal supporters in choosing to gather under the Union Jack. Thus she has dragged Labour in Scotland into a race to the bottom of the barrel. In this contest to recreate the Scotland of the 1950s only the Tories, the masters of divide and conquer, can prevail.

Ms Dugdale has also overseen a lurch to the right at the top of the Labour Party in Scotland and created an atmosphere where anyone even suspected of harbouring pro-Jeremy Corbyn feelings is liable to be ostracised and intimidated. Her recent choices of senior personnel to form her executive entourage have been hugely influential in sending Labour into this reactionary tailspin. It has led to deep, but as yet unspoken, resentment among several senior Scottish senior figures. I fear Ms Dugdale will be made to pay the ultimate price for placing her trust in the wrong people.

Amongst the immediate reactions in Scotland to Theresa May’s decision to call a snap General Election was a curious one which began to take root in the minds of some who ought to know better. It bore all the hallmarks of Tory Central Office sophistry. In this, any trimming of the SNP’s huge number of MPs at Westminster must be regarded as damaging to its mandate to call for a second referendum on independence. This conveniently avoids reality. For any party to win 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland in a Westminster Election was previously considered impossible. In a country long considered a Labour fiefdom only Labour was ever deemed capable of such electoral domination. That it was achieved by the party that wants to end Westminster rule in Scotland told us how far Labour had fallen in Scotland.

A trimming of the Nationalist numbers is almost inevitable at this election, but if none of the two main Unionist parties can make significant ingress into the SNP’s total then it will represent another significant blow to the Union. Another overwhelming SNP triumph at the polls on June 8 would make it three in two years in elections on either side of the Border. In each of them the SNP made a clear manifesto commitment to a second referendum on Scottish independence. In the face of that it will simply be dishonest for Ruth Davidson to continue to claim that “the Scottish people don’t want a second referendum”. Rather, it’s the parties of the Union which ought to wrapping their skirts more tightly around themselves. Each should be facing this election with a deeper sense of foreboding than the SNP.

In a Westminster election there is no list to rescue some of the perennial constituency losers who have pitched up at Holyrood to represent the Tories. There they can look forward to a large salary; a wood-panelled office at Holyrood; help with the mortgage and a job for the spouse to augment the household income. It is a gravy train and the Tories are hanging out of every carriage and giving it “yeehah”, a cry which accurately portrays their dismal offerings in Holyrood debates. The task of winning a first-past-the-post contest is an altogether different matter. They’ll have to put out a helluva lot more Union flags in the housing schemes of their new target demographic if they are to take any of these constituencies. The only Tory MP north of the Border, David Mundell, held on by 798 votes. If the pro-independence Greens opt not to run a candidate in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, thereby giving a clean run to the SNP, then the Tories are facing extinction once more in Scotland.

A similar fate ought to be concentrating minds in the headquarters of Labour in Scotland. Its only MP, Ian Murray in Edinburgh South, only won in 2015 because the SNP fielded a character whom the ancient Romans might have called Candidatus Numptius. In the two years since his election Mr Murray has achieved absolutely nothing apart from heroically resigning from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet … but only after several others had safely done so first. Mr Murray’s smile recalls the words of the great Irish reformer, Daniel O’Connell, to describe William Peel: “His smile was like the silver plate on a coffin.”

In Orkney and Shetland the Liberal Democrats will be represented by Alistair Carmichael, another possessing a wafer-thin majority and who told a lie to damage a fellow politician, Nicola Sturgeon and then another to cover it up. Mr Carmichael admitted that such conduct would have required his resignation had he been a Government minister. Presumably he deems it worthy of the good people of Orkney and Shetland.

It’s not the SNP for whom the bell tolls in the 2017 General Election; it tolls for the parties of the Union and for the Union itself.