CHAMPION WHINGERS

SCOTLAND the Brave? Don't make me laugh.

There's nothing noble about fallen hero Gary McAllister not daring to show his face at Hampden at next month's clash between Scotland and England in the first leg of the Euro 2000 play-offs.

The former Scotland skipper, now working wonders for Coventry, is afraid of provoking a riot. Home fans have never forgiven him for the penalty he missed when England beat Scotland 2-0 three years ago.

Radio 5 presenter Nicky Campbell, rattling on about 1,000 years of English wrongdoing, says it matters not if Scotland fail to make the finals so long as they stop England getting there.

Fiery Gordon Strachan, Gary McAllister's boss at Coventry and another former Scotland captain, is another windbag busily stirring up the hate quota.

"The Scots owe England big time," he says.

"They stole our land, robbed us of our oil, perpetrated the Highland clearances and have even pinched Billy Connolly."

Strachan's reference to clearances goes back more than 200 years when government forces made Scottish families leave their farms in the Highlands.

The Scots are always boasting how well-behaved their fans are, failing to mention that they normally can't be trusted to play against England without tearing up the pitch and raising hell all the way from Wembley to Euston Station.

Scots' nationalism is at fever pitch with the creation of a Scottish parliament.

Like the Australians, they are now questioning the role of the monarchy. There's even talk of the Queen sending the Princess Royal to live in Edinburgh as a royal ambassador.

A weekend opinion poll found most Scots regard the Royals as irrelevant in a devolved Scotland.

Yet the Scots have always fared well in the England they detest so much, whether running football teams, dominating the media or filling seats in the Cabinet.

Not so the English in Scotland. Radio 2 posted Ellen and myself to Scotland in 1996 because some politically-correct executive decided too many programmes were coming out of Oxford Circus.

Apart from one brief radio talk with a colleague in newspapers, I was never once in two years invited to appear on any Scottish programme. The Scots may fall out of the trees in London. It doesn't work the other way round.

Our arrival to present a national radio programme was greeted by editorials asking what this Englishman was supposed to be contributing to Scotland. I soon shut them up by pointing out that my wife was born in Glasgow.

I came away a keen supporter of independence for Scotland if only so we would then have good reason to send them packing back home to whinge among their own kind.

DO US A FAVOUR, CLIFF, AND QUIT

IT TOOK 41 years, but finally EMI Records caught up with my view that Sir Cliff Richard should put a sock in it.

They refused to release his latest offering, The Millennium Prayer set to the music of Auld Lang Syne.

Not to worry, Cliff fans. You shall not be denied.

The Chrysalis label says the prayer is "stunning" and will be happy to issue it.

Proceeds to charity since Sir Cliff is not short of a bob or two.

Cliff hopes the record will achieve his dream of a hit in the 21st Century.

As he approaches his sixties he will then take a year off to contemplate his future.

Let me advise him in two words: quit singing.

I never did take to Cliff.

Perhaps it's his everlasting tan or those boyish ways.

Then there's been years of coy talk about not finding the right girl to marry.

His religious fervour also proved a little too sugary for my taste.

Beyond all that, there's an excellent reason for my

antipathy.

As singers go, Elvis Presley he ain't.

TARA'S FUTILE LITTLE LIFE

WHAT has the so-called 'It' girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson actually done?

She writes a load of rubbish in a Sunday supplement every week and then repeatedly hits the headlines elsewhere by making a fool of herself.

Miss Palmer-Tomkinson avoided mentioning being rushed into an Arizona clinic to cure her cocaine addiction.

Neither did she tell readers of her misbegotten engagement to the playboy son of Sir George Martin.

She's neither an actress nor model and certainly no journalist. I diagnose high society schizophrenia.

The obvious remedy: banishment to daddy's country estate, never to be heard from again.

Time to get real, Harriet

PITY today's mothers - social outcasts if they go to work and damned if they don't.

While the Government is busy finding subsidies to discourage single mothers from staying at home, former social security secretary Harriet Harman demands a year's compulsory maternity leave and £70 a week state benefits so they don't have to go to work.

She produced research by the Institute of Education claiming the children of mothers who go to work before they are a year old are likely to fall behind with reading by the time they reach the age of eight. Children of single mothers are said to do particularly badly, as do those in council housing and from families where nobody works.

What nonsense. I grew up in total poverty without the benefits of parents, was reading by the age of five (courtesy of the Daily Mirror's cartoon page) and went on to edit four national news-papers.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.