We must know who SNP Brexiteers are

So who are the SNP’s Brexit rebels? The party is convulsed after MSP Alex Neil dared break their notorious omerta to reveal that he and six other Nationalist MSPs voted for Brexit.

The news is a serious headache for Nicola Sturgeon, as it throws into stark relief the hypocrisy at the heart of her stance on the EU.

The official line is that all Scots are – in contrast to those Little Englanders on the other side of the Tweed – bona fide Europhiles.

Scotland, Miss Sturgeon constantly harangues, is being ripped from the benign bosom of the EU ‘against its will’.

This, then, is the ‘material change in circumstances’ so earth-shattering that it requires us all to plunge back into the maelstrom of another independence referendum.

All very neat and convenient. Except that it is utter fiction.

Very many Scots voted for Brexit and very many of them were SNP supporters. They grasped the cognitive dissonance inherent in a party that wants to wrest sovereignty from Westminster only to present it on a silver platter to faceless Brussels.

We all knew the schism between Remain and Leave that runs through the country is reflected in the SNP. But Mr Neil has let the cat out of the bag and confirmed it extends right to the very top. So now the public know that the SNP spouts its pro-EU propaganda but that elected figures sit Sphinx-like at Holyrood and don’t believe a blind word – going so far as to vote against Miss Sturgeon’s official line.

Voters have a right to know which of their elected MSPs are in this camp. Who among them is clapping like a trained seal in the chamber when Miss Sturgeon rises to her immaculately shod feet to say Scotland must be protected from Brexit – knowing Leave is the very thing they voted for?