Kate Devlin of the Herald has been a political journalist as long as we can remember.

So it’s quite surprising that she’s apparently never heard of Gordon Brown before.

But it’s a phrase a few paragraphs into the article that’s more revealing:

“Mr Brown has been credited by some as the man who ‘saved the union’ following his intervention in the run up to September’s vote.”

Let’s take a moment to ponder the word “intervention” there, which appears a further three times in the piece. It’s a word that was used in the context of Brown literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in the media during the referendum campaign. Its origin is from the Latin intervenire, derived from inter- ‘between’ + venire ‘come’. It’s normally used, according to the Oxford dictionary:

So semantically-aware readers might well feel that it was an absurdly nonsensical way to describe Gordon Brown’s participation in political debates. Gordon Brown has been a professional politician for decades and is a sitting MP for the Labour Party, whose policies are opposing independence and the SNP.

(We use that phrase in the narrow specific context of this article, but in truth it more or less sums up the party’s entire manifesto in Scotland these days.)

Gordon Brown opposing independence and the SNP, then, is no more an “intervention” than accusing Wayne Rooney of “intervening” in a football match. He’s not an “extraneous factor”, it’s exactly what he’s supposed to be there to do all the time.

The portrayal of Brown as an external force whose involvement is somehow noteworthy in and of itself is a ploy designed to add gravitas to his opinions that they don’t merit on content alone. His infamous fronting of “The Vow” presented the people of Scotland with precisely nothing in the way of new information – it merely reiterated months-old existing pledges by the Unionist parties.

But the press treated it like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, with the BBC giving Brown over an hour of uninterrupted prime-time live news to deliver a run-of-the-mill speech to a few dozen Labour activists like it was the second coming of Christ himself.

(No remotely comparable balancing coverage was ever given to the Yes side.)

Gordon Brown is a backbench MP, an everyday combatant in the field of politics. Him doing his job is not an “intervention”, a shock move by some impartial statesman so struck by the arguments he’s abandoning a position of neutrality to issue unprecedented backing for one side or the other. He isn’t the Queen.

(Now that really WAS an “intervention”.)

Nor, by even the wildest tortured stretch of language imaginable, is he a “secret”. (Though readers familiar with Scots vernacular might willingly concede that he’s a “weapon”.) The fact that Gordon Brown, a current Labour MP, will be campaigning for Labour in a general election is perhaps the ultimate textbook definition of “the bleeding obvious”, and to imply anything else is to insult the intelligence of anyone reading it.

But should poor battered readers be suffering a headache from the idiotic witterings of the Scottish media, or fretting about the “intervention” of such a powerful and totally unexpected influence, they might like to recall the last time Brown was declared “Labour’s secret weapon” in the context of a general election, in April 2011.

We think we remember how that one panned out.