SORRY to spoil your day, but let’s briefly think about three Tories – two ex-ministers and a current one.

I have never had much if any time for Lord Keen of Elie, whose ability – and willingness – to sneer at Scotland and its democratic institutions reached almost Olympic heights. His resignation, typically, was not in defence of Scotland’s Parliament or the rights of its people but on a point of law.

Nonetheless he has to be given some credit for eventually deciding that he could no longer defend the indefensible and that his professional oath and his conscience were more important than his political career.

Of course, David Mundell never found it in himself to do the same, despite regular threats, yet Mundell had been a member of the Scottish Parliament and though he quickly succumbed to that fatal Johsonian (Samuel, not Boris) fallacy that the noblest prospect that a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to England, it was always clear that he supported devolution.

READ MORE: IN FULL: The resignation letter Richard Keen sent to Boris Johnson

In retrospect, even considering his serial failure to resign as promised, Mundell looks positively benign, and his politics boringly mainstream, compared to the rabid right-wing Brexiteer hardliner who was put in his place.

True to form, Alister Jack last week displayed once again his complete contempt for the Scottish people, Parliament and Government in a series of unfortunate interventions.

Jack is, like Keen, a sneerer and has the same Trumpian disdain for lesser beings.

However, he is not as bright as Keen and lacks the self-knowledge which would have said to him at various stages in the past few days that it was time to stand up for the place he was meant to represent.

Jack kicked off his unfortunate run with an intemperate and indeed impertinent letter to the First Minister, a robust reply to which is on its way to him.

Then on the issue of international law he asserted that the UK Government’s deliberate breach was merely minor and technical, even though the EU and his own colleagues had made it clear that it was nothing of the sort.

Worse was to follow. Having boasted about an utterly untrue “power surge” for Scotland, he was revealed in his evidence to the Scottish Affairs Committee as actually being in favour of reducing the powers of the Scottish Parliament by removing the ability to set health regulations for the pandemic.

READ MORE: Alister Jack: Scotland should grow up and stop being different for the sake of it

Jack believes that his constituents are “confused” and it would be best if everything everywhere was the same, which is not very subtle code for saying let Boris decide and let’s scrap this nonsense of a constitution under which we have been living for the past two decades.

His hostility to Holyrood is not a surprise, but it is revealing in the same way as his remark about Brexit was just before last December’s election.

Then he said that he viewed the EU “as a business club that wasn’t fit for purpose. It’s restrictive in many of its practices ... I look at what happens in Asia with free markets”, which rather gave the game away in terms of his priorities. To hell with food safety and the highest of environmental standards, let’s just deregulate and become Singapore on the Solway.

But it is also a reflection of where his Prime Minister sits, who was reported last week to believe that Scotland was “too left wing” and Holyrood given to spending money “raised from English taxpayers on lavish welfare”, according to a well-sourced piece in the Financial Times.

READ MORE: Richard Keen has quit, but who on earth will Boris Johnson get to replace him?

FINALLY, Jack used the same Scottish Affairs Committee evidence session to smear Jeane Freeman in a choreographed exercise with Douglas Ross that, the haplessly overconfident Ross being involved, immediately boomeranged back on them because the written record proved the assertions to be untrue.

A sensible, in tune, Secretary of State working for Scotland wouldn’t have done a single one of these things in a month of Sundays, let alone all of them in the same week.

So what we actually have now is a Secretary of State against Scotland, whose attitudes, politics and approach runs as counter to the reality, let alone the aspirations, of the country as it is possible to imagine.

We could have rid ourselves of such a useless and counterproductive post six years ago, but didn’t grasp the opportunity.

However, when it comes again it will be all the sweeter if it doesn’t just abolish the job, but also makes the current politically alien incumbent unemployed too.