The press stramash at the Scottish Tory conference last week revealed a lot about Prime Ministerial attitudes to Scotland, and much more about the worshipfulness expected from the media.

Rishi Sunak’s minders tried to stop reporters from The Herald and other papers from attending the PM’s customary huddle after his keynote speech.

But the posse sidestepped party officials and entered the briefing room, followed by television crews. After a rumbustious standoff, during which No 10 staff insisted they leave and then threatened to cancel the briefing, Mr Sunak appeared an hour late with all reporters present and footage of the stand-off on every TV channel. As Herald columnist Andy Mciver observed yesterday in a more general sense: “the UK Tory Party is a ball-and-chain around the ankles of its Scottish counterpart.” Quite.

It was an unmitigated embarrassment for Douglas Ross who apologised to reporters and promised to have words with Number Ten. Good luck with that. Because this moment of political theatre simply confirms that two different political cultures clash when a PM comes to Glasgow. Maybe it’s just that more pro-Tory papers exist south of the border. Maybe Scottish journalists are more robust. Or maybe Mr Sunak’s minders have gone completely bonkers. After all, their security colleagues recently hired hundreds of breathless, jogging cops to precede his motorcade North Korean-style, as the PM returned to Downing Street.

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If Mr Sunak needs this amount of protection from folk in London, how much scarier to let Scottish journalists anywhere near The Precious – hacks without generations of inbred “respect” for unelected leaders of southern political parties? Jings. Even I’m feeling the fear.

But it’s not as if the London press pack is a pushover either.

In 2020 Boris Johnson’s people tried a similar cherry-picking exercise, which prompted a solidarity walk-out by the “acceptable” Laura Kuenssberg from the BBC, Robert Peston from ITV and Beth Rigby from Sky News.

Lessons were learned by Number Ten, but evidently forgotten – particularly for encounters with Scots.

It was simply laughable to think that half the Scottish press corps could be excluded from a rare opportunity to quiz a prime minister seldom seen here, as Glasgow conference organisers could easily have told their London counterparts - and doubtless did.

Yet the deaf ear turned to locals is part of a pattern that has long created “difficult” trips north for Westminster leaders.

Jeremy Corbyn made gaffes every time he visited. In 2018, speaking in front of a sign that spelled Keir Hardie as “Keir Hardy” (to be fair probably not his mistake) Mr Corbyn told a massively Remain membership that he would not sign up to the single market. Earlier he revealed that he didn’t know about Scotland’s distinctive legal system, Holyrood’s mitigation of benefits like the bedroom tax or its decision to abolish tuition fees.

Similarly, Boris Johnson's string of Scottish gaffes meant he became the first UK prime minister not to take part in a devolved Scottish election in 2021. He described devolution as a "disaster," japed that Margaret Thatcher had given the UK a "big early start" in the green transition by closing mines and later observed COP26 had taken place in Edinburgh. Easy mistake.

Perhaps he took his cue from predecessor Theresa May whose minders excluded The Herald's independence-supporting sister paper The National from her Brexit deal promotion gig at Bridge of Weir in 2018, when the paper published a blank front page where its coverage of the PM's visit would have been.

And now it seems, journalists from non-independence supporting papers have been added to that special Scottish naughty step.

All but “trustworthy” London-owned Tory-favouring titles are evidently tarred with the same troublesome Scottish brush - even though The Herald, The Scotsman and The Record are read by as many Scottish unionists as the “acceptable” Daily Telegraph, Mail, Express, Sun, Times and P&J.

Bluntly, it seems Sunak like every Westminster leader before him hasn’t been briefed about dealing with straight-talking Scots.

Perhaps that’s because they don't do straight-talking down south.

I was speaking to a London writer who expressed surprise and some admiration for the frank admission of serious difficulty within the SNP by its president, Mike Russell and former leader, Nicola Sturgeon. Here, their words induced some mirth over their understatement. But not in London. No one down there admits defeat or difficulty or nightmarish weeks. Ever.

The instinct is simply to brazen it out. Take the ludicruous resignation statement by Richard Sharp. If the Scottish press corps had been listening to that unbelievably hypocritical homily about putting the interest of the BBC first – in which case his Lordship would have resigned months ago, and actually never have taken the job – I’d like to think there would have been uncontrollable guffaws, and outright laughter.

But this pompous man, who’s given BBC journalists an even tougher time in the eyes of sceptical minorities, has been listened to dutifully and without any vestige of the tough questioning he deserves. No matter what size of a buffoon stands before them, the Emperor is always fully clothed. It is the network way.

Meanwhile, the same inability to read the Scottish room extends to Lambeth Palace which believes a Homage of the People next weekend will allow “a chorus of millions of voices” to put out a “great cry [of support for the King] around the nation and around the world.”

Aye right. That’ll be the coronation that half of Scots won’t watch and 72% don’t care about. The blunt truth is that Scotland is another country. The British establishment knows it, even if Scots are reluctant to recognise and act upon that reality.

And that’s what really worries London minders about Scotland’s press pack. One day, they might just “go native”. In the event, despite the almighty snub delivered, all the rejected journalists produced very fair reports of what the PM said – repeating his intention to block another referendum and deliver no new powers to Holyrood, confirming that Scotland will have had our “nearest thing to federalism” – at least on the Tories’ watch. Of course, those journalists also reported on that cack-handed exclusion attempt and those headlines will doubtless feed the Scotophobia of Mr Sunak’s London minders. It's a sair fecht.

But Scots should rejoice in the tenacity of our journalists, their solidarity in the face of Tory interference and the hope that one day, political leaders will not fear trips north, because Scots actually elected them and they live amongst us.