BETTY, from Alloa, has seen her fair share of elections. Therefore when she looked me straight in the eye last Friday and said “Maggie May” then it seemed a good idea to listen, particularly when it became evident she was not talking about a Rod Stewart concert from the 1970s.

“Call her Maggie May” she said. Betty’s point was a simple one: Margaret Thatcher was known as the “milk snatcher”. Now Theresa May is after the kids’ dinners. It seems that the manifesto launch of Thursday has resonated with the voters but not perhaps in the manner that the Tory high command had hoped.

The message was meant to be that a “strong leader” needed a “big majority” to make the “hard choices” necessary to steer the country through. Trouble is that ordinary people have quickly cottoned on to the fact that the “hard choices” are for everyone else, except for the Tory Party and its backers.

Snatching the lunches literally out of the mouths of one million kids is only the starter of course. The Tory manifesto offers a single transferable menu of potential problems – the “Death Tax”, deleting the “triple lock”, means-testing of winter fuel allowance, and clear signals of tax and national insurance rises to come.

Thus we arrived at this past wobbly weekend for the Tories as it begins to sink in that Theresa May is an even worse election leader than Jeremy Corbyn. Of course Labour can’t even get its lines right on its review of Trident, but at least they are not putting forward proposals to impoverish pensioners.

The Tory lead is still comfortable enough and no doubt Sir Lynton Crosby still has to produce from his grizzly locker innumerable scare stories about that dreadful extremist Jeremy Corbyn. But there is a diminishing return on Tory smears, as Michael Fallon found out to his cost on the Andrew Marr sofa last week.

It doesn’t take much to change a narrative, even with the pliant and obliging Tory press which has been visited upon these sceptered islands. In that world it might even be necessary to talk up Labour for a few days so the shires will focus on the prospect of a government under Jeremy Corbyn – and therefore rally to prevent this from happening! The connection between May and Thatcher is particularly bad for the Tories in Scotland.

There was a time when Ruth Davidson thought that the road to recovery was to distance herself from the toxic Tories in the south. Now she embraces them up to and including the heinous “rape clause” on tax credits.

Swept away in her own hype she has now got herself into the ridiculous position of arguing that any Tories elected in Scotland will advocate means-testing the winter fuel allowance in England but not in Scotland. Means-testing for English people will be the Tory battlecry in Scotland, despite the obvious difficulty that this process of means-testing in England will squeeze Scotland’s public funding even further. So much for national unity and pull the other one!

HOWEVER, what will damage the Tories in Scotland is not just the Thatcher connection but the Ukip one. What will really burst the Tory bubble is when people start realising the reason for all these poisonous pills in the Tory manifesto is the cost of hard Brexit.

Back in the day when Ruth Davidson was a Remainer she was a keen advocate of warning of the damage that the Brexiteer plans would do to the country.

Then UK Treasury estimated UK GDP would be between 5.4 per cent and 9.5 per cent of GDP lower after 15 years if we left the EU with no successor arrangement, with a central estimate of 7.5 per cent. As the official forecast said: “The net impact... would be a loss of between £38bn and £66bn per year after 15 years, driven by the smaller size of the economy.”

George Osborne then presented these medium term forecasts as if they were “Apocalypse Now” thus discrediting the Remain campaign in England.

However, the Treasury officially have not updated this forecast for a very good reason and that is that any serious medium term assessment will show a similar level of cost in tax revenues, at least in the tens of billions.

Thus we have the dirty big secret of the Tory campaign. The Treasury refuse to forecast the cost of hard Brexit but the Tory manifesto is already preparing for it.

It is pensioners who will pay the cost of hard Tory Brexit. It is hungry children who will pay for leaving the single market. And it is all of us who will stump up for the Tory failure to own up to the real cost of driving the British bus off the European cliff.