Hello again! We apologise for the recent 19-hour interruption to normal Wings Over Scotland service, which was almost certainly the result of a cyber-attack by the KGB.

Not really, of course. A combination of a badly-coded plugin, human error and the global curse of spam comments is most likely what actually took us offline for most of yesterday and this morning. But in the light of today’s Sunday Herald front-page scoop, it’s hard to be absolutely sure.

Under the attention grabbing headline “Cameron’s plea to Putin: help me stop Salmond”, news of the story set social media aflame last night under the hashtag #indyrefski (which we modestly admit being the inventors of), even before the details were revealed. The crucial passage was this one:

“The Tass report, by one of the agency’s correspondents, hit the Russian language news wires on Hogmanay. Its opening paragraph reads: ‘Great Britain is extremely interested in the support of Russia, as holder of the G8 presidency, in two vital areas in 2014: the Afghan pull-out and the Scottish independence referendum.’ In the traditional style of a Russian news wire report, this assertion was then attributed to a ‘representative’ in the Prime Minister’s office who was speaking anonymously. The journalist then added a direct quote from the unnamed source talking of ‘two main issues whose resolution requires international formats, albeit of different modalities’. The Cameron Government insider then, according to the report, added: ‘Those are the withdrawal of combat units from Afghanistan by the end of the 2014 and September’s referendum on Scottish independence. We believe that the G8 could become one of the main political platforms where London will find backing.’ The journalist added that although the referendum might ‘look like a UK domestic matter’, it had, according to his UK Government source, the potential to ‘send shockwaves across the whole of Europe’.”

So, no big deal, then. The Prime Minister who refuses to debate independence with Alex Salmond because it’s a matter for Scots alone in fact wants to pressgang all of the world’s most powerful nations – not just Vladimir Putin’s oppressive Russia – into Project Fear. And while the Herald deserves much kudos for its quarrying in the Russian newswires, it turns out this isn’t exactly a revelation.

As far back as at least last July, the rumour was that the UK government was pressuring its foreign allies to intervene in the debate, while simultaneously insisting that as an Englishman the PM should take no part. Today’s news appears to considerably firm up the claim.

To be honest, there isn’t much else to say. It’s hardly as if the UK government’s transparent hypocrisy hasn’t been exposed before, after all. And we can’t say we’ll exactly fall off our chairs tomorrow if the rest of the media doesn’t follow up the Herald’s lead. The all-Unionist panel on Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” today (about which we can’t complain – there was an all-nat one a week or two back) did its best to play the story down, and we expect the press to take a similar line.

All we’d advise is that the next time the press screams long and loud about some heavily-spun comment from Mariano Rajoy or some similar foreign dignatory, readers bear in mind how heavily they might have been leaned on to say it.