After the promises, the payback. Having told the Scots they could have anything they wanted provided they didn’t vote for independence – a sequence of events now officially trademarked “The Solemn Vow” by all parties – parliament met for a general debate on devolution following the Scottish referendum. The title of the debate was just about the last time that Scotland was mentioned for the next 90 minutes.

William Hague opened proceedings for the government and dispensed with Scotland in seconds. Whatever the solemn vow thingy was, it would be honoured. For some reason the Scottish National party MPs didn’t seem terribly reassured by this, but Hague just told them to chill out. Or rather, to butt out. This wasn’t about them any more; it was about extracting the maximum political advantage for the Conservative party. English Votes for English Laws, aka the Forces of Evel.

The Forces of Evel weren’t “bound together” with “The Solemn Vow”, he assured the House. “But it was useful to do so. A basic matter of fairness.”

Just how useful and fair Hague would have found it if the Tories were the ones with the most Scottish MPs and faced being on the wrong end of the electoral maths, he didn’t care to say. He was just disappointed Labour “couldn’t even pretend to have some ideas” and join in cross-party talks at the cabinet committee. For reasons best known to themselves, Labour entrusted the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, to respond to the leader of the house. This is a bit like asking a narcoleptic to be a nightwatchman. He’s a good constituency MP, but in the Commons he is leaden and leaves no cliche unturned. Even by the current standards of the Labour frontbench, he is unimpressive. The longer he spoke, the more depressed his colleagues became.

Having shown he had failed to grasp that Ukip had won in Clacton precisely because it campaigned on issues such as the Forces of Evel, Khan’s main pledge was a similar race to the bottom that the three party leaders had made to the Scots. England could have as much devolution as it liked. Seaside votes for seaside towns. Village votes for village idiots. Anything. Just so long as Labour’s Scottish MPs could vote in parliament. As for the West Lothian question itself, the Tories should just try to win a few more Scottish MPs. A few Labour MPs left at that point to throw themselves into the Thames.

Rather more left when Michael Moore, the Lib Dem former secretary of state for Scotland, rose to speak – partly because he’s rather dull, but mainly because he insisted on bringing the debate back to Scotland. This wasn’t what anyone had come for and the remaining MPs chatted amongst themselves. Then came Gordon Brown. Having saved the world (™Gordon Brown) and saved the union (™Gordon Brown) the former prime minister was making a rare appearance in the Commons to save the Labour party.

He might just have done so. Having twitched and yawned his way through the opening speeches, he rose to make an intelligent and passionate argument against the Forces of Evel. David Cameron’s opportunism was designed to crush minorities and would tear apart the union he claimed he wanted to preserve. “Nations can collapse by accident,” he observed, before segueing into an extract from St Mark’s gospel. The Forces of Evel could not compete with the Word of God.