The National:

MICHAEL Gove, for it was he, met an actual voter in a Glasgow street, who actually said he was pleased with the Tory vote, and didn’t want a referendum any time soon. Well knock me down with an election leaflet.

I have little doubt that there were other Glaswegians out and about in the city yesterday; the city with an SNP-controlled council, whose constituency MSPs are all SNP, and which heavily voted Yes and Remain in 2014 and 2016. And even less doubt that the message they might have conveyed to this most annoying of faux Scots would have been a) less supportive and b) couched in unmistakeable Weegie tones.

Prior his Sabbath dauner down Sauchiehall Street, Gove had advised the Andrew Marr Show that referenda and court challenges were not subjects about which the voters were liable to be much exercised. Perhaps he missed the many pronouncements of Professor Sir John Curtice on the same day.

These days Sir John is to psephology what David Attenborough is to the natural world – an all purpose guru whose judgement is supposedly unimpeachable.

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The professor opined that given the turnout and the tactical voting deployed last Thursday, matters constitutional were very much at the forefront of most minds as they clutched their free issue pencil.

None of which will have been of any consequence to Mr Michael Andrew Gove, a man to whom self doubt is the rarest of visitors. Flagging up the single opinion of a single voter is the oldest, weariest trick in the political book. (See also “Mrs McTumshie husnae goat her second jag yet and she’s 103 next Tuesday.”)

Mr Gove, in my view, is a more dangerous sort than his boss – the man whom he once stabbed in the front to prevent his running for the leadership. It had come to his notice, he advised the waiting press corps, that Mr Johnson did not have the required character and skills for the top job. Well even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The National:

Mr Johnson is the kind of liar who manages to convince himself that he is telling the truth, even if only for so long as his lips are moving.

By contrast, Mr Gove represents the sleekit tendency – a man with a grasp of the relevant facts who displays selective amnesia when using them in interviews – interviews, incidentally, where he has honed the twin skills of never answering the question he is asked and talking relentlessly over his interlocutor.

Mr Gove knows fine well that getting an overall majority within a system designed to produce coalition is the kind of mountain where the Tories could never expect to get much beyond base camp. He kens too that when this was achieved by the SNP in 2011, it was won with a smaller vote than they achieved on May 6th.

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And he knows that in contrast only a minority of UK voters even turned up for the Brexit vote where Leave “won” by the narrowest of margins, for an “advisory referendum” which was re-packaged as the sacred will of the people. Aye right.

Turns out that the back of his sofa seems not to contain the £350m a week bounty Brexit would shower upon the NHS.

Furthermore, we will take no lectures on sowing division mid-pandemic from a man who helped orchestrate the leaving of the European Market without a pot to piss in at a minute to midnight, from a man whose boss couldn’t find the time to turn up to five crucial COBRA meetings and only sanctioned lockdown number one when it was clear there was carnage unfolding in care homes.

People may not stop Michael Gove in the street to beg him for a Section 30 order. But let him be in no doubt that across the spectrum of Scottish life there is nothing less than despair at the incompetence and corruption of his government.