A SILLY YouTube cartoon by the Conservatives features Alex Salmond tooting away on a recorder, while Ed Miliband leaps around like a demented Rudolf Nureyev.

The terrifying message to English voters is that the former SNP leader is back, preparing to put the Labour leader in Downing Street – and will then “call the tune”.

This is the Tory accusation you will hear endlessly until election day, that Mr Miliband – falling short of a majority, because of defeat in Scotland – will be an SNP puppet.

Mr Salmond embraces it with glee, boasting his party will make Westminster cough up billions for his homeland and even start the high-speed rail line from Edinburgh.

He told a weekend interviewer: “If you hold the balance, then you hold the power.” Which will be news to long-suffering and beaten-down Liberal Democrats...

The SNP could demand the devolution of corporation tax and capital gains tax, employer national insurance, the national minimum wage and energy regulation.

Some Conservatives have also contemplated a back-door route for themselves into No 10 using Scottish votes – despite that mocking cartoon – although Mr Salmond quickly ruled it out.

Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, the Democratic Unionist Party seeks a £1bn payback for keeping a Tory or Labour government in power, including the end of the "bedroom tax".

Now, on one level, the Tory cartoon is silly because, if Mr Miliband does lead the largest party, he will surely put forward a programme and dare the Nationalists to vote it down?

The price for doing so would be letting the Tories back in which would cause fury in Scotland. The SNP will not be “writing the Labour budget”.

Nevertheless, these rumblings reflect the reality that all the parties will have to consider all sorts of deals in the next hung parliament – giving muscle to the Nationalist parties.

But who will speak up for this region in this frenzy, when there is pressure on politicians to act in haste and repent at leisure?

We had a taste last autumn, when the big three parties suddenly – in panic – gave Scots “the Vow” that they can keep their many extra billions from the Barnett Formula forever. A few weeks’ later, Labour caved in and joined the Conservative and Liberal Democrats in promising Holyrood control of air passenger duty (APD).

This week, a Lords committee expressed “astonishment” that Westminster acted at this helter-skelter pace and appeared not to have “considered the wider implications for the United Kingdom”.

Newcastle Airport and North-East MPs reacted with fury to the APD threat and David Cameron is now scrambling to catch up, with a vague promise of no “unfair tax competition”.

I imagine there will be similar anger in the North-East if Northern Ireland – as well as Scotland – abolishes the bedroom tax, while it survives in the part of England hit hardest by it.

In hung parliaments, the game is pork barrel politics – but this region has no similar way of bringing home the bacon.

AS Ed Balls spoke to journalists in his Commons office yesterday, my eye strayed to his shelf…and a picture of him whacking me in the eye in last September’s football match. The headline above it read: “Now let’s give Tories the elbow.”