Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:

Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.

(We apologise in advance for the playground nature of the “he said she said” which is about to follow – it’s something we usually try to avoid because it’s boring, but this case is so despicable it needs recording as an illustration both of Hague’s cavalier attitude to the truth and his loathsome personal nature.)

This tweet was posted on his timeline at around 10pm, as Hague was busy whining huffily about an article we’d posted earlier in the day exposing an incredibly dishonest column that he’d penned for the Record:

The full text of the supposed tweets can be seen below:

The object, of course, was to embarrass this site and myself as part of the ongoing Unionist campaign of discrediting so-called “GERS deniers”. But when I was shown the supposed tweets they immediately smelled fishy.

The first one contained a clanging grammatical error that I’d never normally make – putting a question mark at the end of the final sentence, which isn’t a question. The number of retweets and likes also seemed enormously high for March 2013, when I’d normally have been doing well to get into double figures.

So I did several searches for text from the tweets, with predictable results.

Nothing matched the criteria. I normally never delete tweets – however “controversial” or potentially embarrassing they may be – for anything other than typos, partly on principle and partly because there’s no point trying to hide stuff on the internet.

But just in case I had in a moment of weakness and forgotten about it, I tried searching for the other half of the supposed conversation in the second tweet, with SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter.

But the only exchange we’d had on 26 November 2013 was about childcare costs, not anything even passingly related to GERS.

I also searched for anything tweeted by Mhairi on that day that my supposed tweet would have made sense as a reply to, drawing another blank.

The most conclusive proof that the tweets were fakes, though, is the fact that Wings had been publishing articles pointing out the flaws in GERS since at least November 2012, four months before the first of the alleged tweets.

Alert readers eventually discovered that the tweets had in fact been faked by a toxic “parody” account linked to Hague’s blog (that Twitter refuse to do anything about, because they’re epically useless). Hague had then posted them in a tweet from, perhaps accidentally, his own account. We wish we could say we were shocked.

(We must note that we can’t be certain Hague is the operator of the “parody” account.)

We’re not holding our breath for a retraction or apology, nor do we expect the BBC or Daily Record to stop using Hague to antagonise Yes supporters by giving hugely disproportionate exposure to a man with no more qualifications or expertise in the field of economics than a random urine-soaked tramp scooped from outside a bus station.

(He’s the Scottish equivalent of UKIP in that sense. It surely can’t be too long before they give him a spot on Question Time.)

Indeed, as we write this BBC Scotland are planning to heinously insult the respected academic and actual genuine expert Professor Richard Murphy by giving Hague parity of esteem with him in a radio debate about GERS.

Wings Over Scotland is the subject of incessant false smears from Unionists in both the social and mainstream media, many of them highly personal in nature, (along with unending torrents of base abuse) because No activists are unable to refute the facts published on the site and fear its dissemination of truth to a huge readership, so they attempt to discredit the messenger instead.

We’ll continue to take it as the massive compliment it is.