The National:

WE know Tory politicians very often like to forget about Scotland or treat it as an afterthought.

But it would appear a former aide to David Cameron took that to new extremes, according to an extract from ex-Tory MP Rory Stewart’s new memoir Politics on the Edge.

He claimed Steve Hilton once stared at a map on the floor in Number 10 and exclaimed: “F*** me, look how big Scotland is. That is just f****** mad man.”

Yes Steve, oor lands do form well over a third of the UK and more than five million of us live here. Nice to meet you.

Keen to continue distancing himself from anything that lay outside of London, Hilton apparently also told Stewart he wanted to “blow up the Foreign Office” which he claimed to be useless, while also suggesting getting rid of its ambassadors.

According to the amusing passage of Stewart’s book, all this apparently happened in Hilton’s “empty” office where he pottered about with no shoes on, nodding “furiously” in “apparent wonder at things I would have guessed he had already considered".

His might have had his feet on the ground, but his head was clearly elsewhere.