You’ll not often find me linking to the Daily Mail. It’s even less likely that you’ll find me praising anything on its pages. However, I have to make an exception for one article today.

Guy Adams outlines in some detail the sort of abuse Charles Kennedy and his team were subjected to from supporters of the SNP, both online and in the street.

He quotes Charles’ campaign manager, Conn O’Neill at length. He described returning back to Charles’ cottage the morning after the election:

It was a Friday morning, when the rubbish gets taken out in and around Fort William,’ recalls Kennedy’s campaign manager, Conn O’Neill. ‘When Charles got back to the cottage, he discovered his bins upturned and left at the end of his driveway. It seemed as if someone had gone through them and spread the contents everywhere. ‘There was litter all over the place. Most of it ended up strewn over the field across the road.

He also quotes Candy Piercy, but she didn’t actually talk to them. It may be that he took that quote from our article on the day the SNP candidate took a posse to Charles’ office in Fort Williams and shouted at the staff because he didn’t like something from Charles’ Facebook.

The online abuse Charles received was really unpleasant:

To appreciate the general tone of such nastiness, you need only glance at Twitter, where, on the morning of election day, Kennedy remarked: ‘Campaign teams across the constituency are fighting hard to win, polls are open until 10pm. Spare me a thought.’ A few seconds later, an SNP supporter called Paul Smythe responded to this innocuous comment as follows: ‘I will give you a thought tomorrow when you are where you belong, retired and not a drunken embarrassment any more.’ It was just one of hundreds of similar abusive messages in which SNP supporters had sought to exploit Kennedy’s drink problem. Days earlier, to take another example at random, another user of the site, called Donald P. Maclean, whose Twitter profile carried an SNP logo, had dubbed him a ‘drunken alcoholic a**ehole’, while a man called Mark Rooney called him an ‘alkie c**t’.

Charles’ successor as MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber Ian Blackford has spent the last week claiming that he and Charles were friends, but he certainly didn’t act like it and his remarks in his maiden speech made before Charles died were perfunctory in the extreme.

What’s interesting is that some of the perpetrators abused Charles using their own names and held office in the SNP or worked for MSPs.

Take Brian Smith, who describes himself as ‘convenor’ of the party’s Skye and Lochalsh branch, and whose Twitter feed is followed by four SNP MPs, including Mr Blackford. In January alone, Smith used the social networking site to contact Kennedy more than 50 times, calling him a ‘Quisling’ — a term of abuse meaning ‘traitor’ — and filing a vile message attacking his alcoholism. Charles tried to rise above it, but it must have hurt ‘I am disgusted at you not doing your job,’ it read. ‘Do you have a “problem” that stops you going to Westminster?’ Between then and polling day, Smith — who, remember, is supposedly an SNP convenor — used Twitter to directly attack Mr Kennedy more than a hundred times.

If anyone in our party behaved like that, I’d hope that they would at the very least be told off the first time and thrown out if they kept on behaving like that.

This, sadly, is par for the course on what politics is like up here now. It’s the worst atmosphere I’ve ever found in my life and I spent the 90s fighting Labour in Chesterfield.

Politics shouldn’t be like this, yet when nationalism of any description gets a stranglehold, it often trails division and intimidation in its wake. Look at what happened to Naomi Long and Anna Lo in Northern Ireland, and that was just about flying a few flags. Most people in the SNP aren’t like that, but they need to deal effectively with the people in their movement who are. In the wake of another tale of nationalist intimidation, I wrote in April:

This all makes me very worried about a scenario where we end up with an EU referendum, the UK votes to leave (unlikely though I think that is) and Scotland then has another independence referendum. A choice between an illiberal, intolerant society where conformity is demanded and economic armageddon doesn’t appeal.

Update: At the first commenter’s suggestion, I’ve found a few of the tweets mentioned in the article and embedded them below:

@charles_kennedy just put an old empty whisky bottle in the window its the same thing — claire robertson (@clairerobsc1) April 13, 2015

@dmross63 @DonaldCowey @charles_kennedy @IBlackfordSkye hey charlie are you sponsered by whyte and mackay whiskey by any chance — claire robertson (@clairerobsc1) April 13, 2015

@charles_kennedy you’ve have got to be joking. You are a washed out embarrassment now. I bet your probably pissed right now! #disgrace — Fanny Alexander (@Fanny_Out) April 12, 2015

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings