SCOTLAND’S lone Tory MP David Mundell promised that any “sensible” suggestion for extra powers for Scotland would be considered when the Scotland Bill was considered by the House of Commons.

Who gets to decide what is “sensible’’? The answer, of course, is the Conservative Party, which has no mandate whatsoever in Scotland and which has already demonstrated its top priority is its own political advantage rather than the best outcome for a nation that has overwhelmingly rejected the thrust of its policies.

One suggestion definitely not considered “sensible’’ was that section of the Bill guaranteeing the permanence of the Scottish Parliament, which the Tories last night used their Commons majority to throw out, despite support for it from the SNP, Labour and the LibDems.

Wait a minute... wasn’t this notion of the permanence of Holyrood one of the few specific promises of the now-notorious Vow? And wasn’t that Vow signed by none other than the Conservative party leader David Cameron?

The Prime Minister must have considered the promise “sensible’’ when he supported it... unless of course he was prepared to sign virtually anything to persuade Scottish voters to remain in the Union, while all the while being prepared to ditch any of these promises once the referendum had been safely won.

Which is exactly why Cameron wasted no time in injecting the notion of English Votes for English Laws into the debate just hours after Scotland voted No... a notion that had curiously never been mentioned during the referendum campaign itself.

The Better Together parties were always divided over exactly what the Vow meant in the first place, even though their leaders had all signed on the faux parchment on the Daily Record front page.

To Gordon Brown it was devo max, home rule, the beginning of a federal United Kingdom. To the Conservatives it was obviously something else entirely.

Since September last year we have been told that the Vow has been delivered, and then that it must be delivered, and then that the Tories were (surprise, surprise) reneging on it.

It’s now clear that the Conservatives have no intention of even living up to the limited powers suggested by the Smith Commission, far less giving serious consideration to the extra powers Scotland might have believed to be a fair result of the overwhelming message it sent to Westminster at the General Election.

And so full fiscal autonomy will be consigned to the dustbin. Giving Scotland full control over its own money would, according to Mundell, have resulted in a “shambles’’, obviously because we need wiser heads than our own to determine how our taxes should be spent.

We can surely expect the same fate to await those powers suggested yesterday by the SNP: control of corporation tax, capital gains tax, the minimum wage or National Insurance... all to be considered too important for us to deal with.

In the last speech of his political career yesterday, Labour’s former leader in Scotland Jim Murphy said that the Conservatives had decided their own political interests were more important than the interests of Britain. As a result, he predicted, Cameron would precipitate another referendum on Scottish independence.

Murphy has been wrong about pretty much everything since he took up office just a few short months ago.

It’s a shame that he delayed being right about something until minutes before leaving the political stage.