The SNP Energy Secretary has been accused of ‘brazen hypocrisy’ after attempting to offer an olive branch to long-suffering job creators in Scotland.

Stephen Flynn was unveiled in John Swinney’s new cabinet last week with responsibility for jump-starting the country’s sluggish commercial prospects.

But on Friday he took aim at the North Sea windfall tax – which he had previously backed despite warnings it would turn the NorthEast into an unemployment black spot.

He also tried to curry favour with Scotland’s entrepreneurs – even though he has just been elected to Holyrood on an SNP manifesto promising to hit high earners even harder.

Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay said: ‘Stephen Flynn is talking the talk on economic growth.

‘But he seems to have forgotten that he’s now a member of John Swinney’s Left-wing government which only knows how to hike taxes and is doggedly determined to keep raising benefits.

‘During the election, John Swinney tried to dupe oil and gas workers by hinting at a softening of the SNP’s anti-drilling stance, but he fooled no one.

‘And now Stephen Flynn is playing the same trick. Let’s also not forget that the SNP, including Flynn, were vocal in their demands for the introduction of the windfall tax in 2022, so what he’s saying now is brazen hypocrisy.’

Mr Findlay added: ‘The hostility of the SNP and Labour is an existential threat to the future of North Sea oil and gas, with 1,000 jobs already being lost every month.’

Mr Flynn was SNP leader at Westminster but won the Aberdeen Deeside and North Kincardine seat at the Scottish election on May 7.

He told the Herald in his first interview as a Cabinet Secretary charged with re-energising Scotland’s toiling economy: ‘I’ve been incredibly frustrated at the fact I’ve sat and watched consecutive UK Governments treat the North Sea as an afterthought and just assume that they can continue to impose policies upon it and still extract revenues and maintain a highly skilled, world-class workforce. It hasn’t worked.’

He continued: ‘I don’t need to read the reports that tell me 1,000 people a month are losing their jobs in the sector. I’ve been in and spoken with people who have been told that their jobs are no longer going to be there.’

In 2022, after household energy prices doubled in the wake of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was Mr Flynn who led an SNP House of Commons debate demanding a surcharge on all companies making extra money from the crisis.

The latest SNP manifesto backed off from scrapping the windfall tax, instead calling for it to ‘replaced by a fair system that taxes excess profits but protects jobs’.

Meanwhile, Mr Flynn appeared to offer a softer stance on Scotland’s income tax rates for higher earners.

The effect of these is that anyone drawing a wage of more than £29,526 is currently paying more tax than they would if they lived in the rest of the UK.

Mr Flynn said: ‘Perhaps [they have] not got as much left to give as some other people would like to think that they do.’

But he refused to give a guarantee that the UK-Scotland tax gap wouldn’t widen over the next five years of SNP government.