This Scottish Conservative Party conference, folk kept telling me proudly, was its “biggest and busiest” in years.

It didn’t feel that way, although perhaps Glasgow’s cavernous Clyde auditorium made a reasonable turnout seem small. It was certainly the most upbeat I can remember, with the party’s Old Guard and new influx of young activists exuding hitherto unusual levels of political confidence.

Whether it was the Prime Minister’s lengthy articulation of a more muscular Unionism or Ruth Davidson’s stated ambition to become First Minister, this was a Conservative and Unionist party emboldened by electoral recovery and opposition to a second independence referendum.

But confidence can easily give way to hubris, and at conference I kept encountering arguments and attitudes which struck me as confused or complacent, or both.

Take opposition to a second referendum. On the face of it, Ms Davidson couldn’t have been clearer in her conference speech on Saturday afternoon. “Are you listening, Nicola Sturgeon?” she asked rhetorically. “No. Second. Referendum.” Speaker after speaker, meanwhile, said the party would do “everything possible” to oppose another “divisive” ballot.

Yet behind the scenes – and in press briefings for the last few weeks – the UK Government has more or less conceded that, if asked, it’d sanction another Section 30 Order, albeit with caveats about timing. Self-evidently, that isn’t doing “everything possible” to prevent another referendum, it would be actively facilitating one.

Theresa May’s otherwise interesting speech on Friday morning also indulged in similar doublespeak. Politics, she said, isn’t “a game”, yet she and her advisers are active participants in an on-going chess match regarding the future of the Union. Now of course Westminster would be within its constitutional and legal rights to say an unequivocal No to another referendum, but all but the most rabid Unionist (and there were a few at conference) knows that’d be politically disastrous.

But again there some loose talk emanating from the main conference stage. The Scottish Government, several delegates confidently proclaimed, have “no mandate” for another plebiscite, while apparently “no one” in Scotland wants it to take place. Well, the SNP’s mandate might not be “cast iron” as the First Minister claims, but it certainly exists, while polls show a sizeable minority do, in fact, want another referendum. Several dozen, for example, could be seen protesting outside the conference venue.

And take the party’s approach to the Scottish Labour Party. Kezia Dugdale and comrades were repeatedly mocked, and of course one can understand the desire for revenge given the boot used to be on the other foot, but by denigrating another Unionist party Conservatives were, by extension, weakening the Union they purport to support.

Now this sort of tactic might pay short-term electoral dividends, as it’s likely to do in May’s local government elections, but I can’t help feeling it’ll have long-term political and constitutional consequences. It also raises another contradiction: the SNP, we are repeatedly told, are “dividing” Scotland, but arguably so does this sort of stuff; it certainly won’t make it any less polarised.

On Friday afternoon there was a slightly surreal “debate” concerning opposition to another referendum. It was all very apocalyptic. Tory MSP Oliver Mundell referred, in a deliberate Soviet analogy, to Scotland being under the “nationalist yoke”, while another alluded to a constitutional “cloud”. It was as if, I remarked to another MSP on the way, that a war was imminent. “Well,” he replied, “it is.”

So, as usual, there was the obvious hypocrisy of banging on about the constitution while criticising your opponents for doing exactly the same thing. But then constitutional chatter is now the necessary life blood of Scotland’s two largest political parties (the SNP and Tories for the avoidance of doubt), both of whom are – to varying degrees – behaving in a nationalist way.

A typically penetrating cartoon by Martin Rowson in Saturday’s Guardian entertainingly illustrated the point. Depicting Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May glowering at each other on either side of a large mirror, both stood close to the same caption: “Referendum obsessed national zealots and foamers”. Both, of course, have their preferred Unions, and both are neglecting public services as a result.

Which reminds me of another point. After last May’s Holyrood election, I argued in this column that modern Scottish Conservatism had to be about more than simply opposing (or not, as the case may be) another referendum, yet judging by Ruth Davidson’s speech it remains a policy-free zone. All we got on Saturday was an independent advisory board on the NHS and a “root-and-branch” review of the Curriculum for Excellence (a policy, it’s worth remembering, the Scottish Tories originally supported).

It’s not really credible to criticise the Scottish Government for prioritising the constitution above day-to-day governance without offering an alternative policy prospectus beyond advisory panels and reviews. If Ruth Davidson really wants to become First Minister it wasn’t altogether clear from her speech what she’d actually do beyond, um, opposing independence.

When I made this point to a few delegates it was greeted with uncomprehending looks and implications of negativity. A Law Society of Scotland fringe meeting was also instructive, full of Old Guard Tories heckling and grumbling whenever independent commentators made perfectly valid points similar to those in this column. At points it felt like being at another party conference (i.e. the SNP’s).

What, meanwhile, of the Union and Unionism? In her speech, the Prime Minister called the UK a union of “people, affections and loyalties”, and she was to be applauded for attempting to explain these at greater length than David Cameron ever managed in similar perorations. But, as she spoke, one part of that Union was declaring the results of an election which most delegates probably hadn’t even realised was happening.

By day two of the Scottish Tory conference Northern Ireland no longer had a Unionist majority and Sinn Fein had come within a whisker of becoming the largest party. What, I found myself wondering, binds Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales together beyond a balance sheet? That might have been enough for much of the 20th century, but is it any longer?

Conservatives (and Unionists) ought to beware the Ides of March. Within a couple of weeks Article 50 will be triggered, Northern Ireland might be under direct rule or facing fresh elections, and the SNP could be on the cusp of calling for another independence referendum. Scottish Tories might have left their conference feeling in control of events but hubris, of course, means pride before a fall.