A new candidate or candidates is required to fill the unofficial post of national sporting celebrity Preferably he or she should be British

A new candidate (or candidates) is required to fill the unofficial post of national sporting celebrity Preferably he or she should be British. But Europeans, even Latin Americans, will be given equal consideration. Exceptional ability in the chosen sport is essential, as is charisma. Most vices and eccentricities will be welcome to the selection board Applicants need not put their names forward in writing. They will be informally notified of their appointment when their name(s) appear in headlines on the front page of every national newspaper Clearly, the selection process is highly unpredictable. The retirement of Eric Cantona is not only a grievous blow to everyone professing faith in Manchester United Football Club.

It would be well for the Government, as the Lib Dems have done, to think creatively about the answers to Dalyell’s tiresome, repetitive but inescapable question.. At least one Scottish Labour backbencher (without anti-devolutionist form) was struck, during the election campaign, by how divided his constituents seemed to be on the issue.At the moment the Scottish Tories couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag; but the threat that some future Tory government might arbitrarily and brutally reduce Scottish representation could yet be used to deter some support in the referendum. A powerful argument for the parliament, that a Labour Scotland doesn’t want to be controlled by a politically alien administration, is inevitably reduced when the UK majority is the same as Scotland’s. But if the principle is wrong, it is wrong whatever the parliamentary arithmetic. In fact the Miller figures simply show that in practice a Labour government has little to fear from excluding Scottish MPs from solely English and Welsh matters.It is worth remembering that the Scottish referendum, good as the auspices are, isn’t yet won.

That is sometimes used as an argument for saying the West Lothian question doesn’t matter because it would so infrequently make a difference in practice. Indeed, only the 1964 government and the first one in 1974 haven’t. The important point is that Powell, as he made perfectly clear at the time, was arguing that there were no solutions to the problems he saw in home rule. If his remark meant anything, it was that we shouldn’t have a Scottish parliament.As the Scottish academic Bill Miller has frequently pointed out, governments with convincing UK majorities have also had majorities in England. We are, in the best sense of the word, peers in every respect and sit on a basis of equality of responsibility and rights.”You don’t hear constitutional reformers quoting Powell quite so readily on the threat a reformed and therefore legitimised Lords would pose to the ancient sovereignty of the Commons. The Scotsman advocated it before the election – just a few days after it had been pointed out in The Independent that Blair’s freedom to put it into practice, if he chose, would be much greater if he won a landslide victory.

(Because with a big majority in England, he would not need the Scots to win votes.)But its antecedents go much further back than that. Gladstone’s 1893 Government of Ireland Bill originally proposed that Irish MPs should be excluded from matters “confined to Great Britain or some part thereof”. And Section 66 of the 1978 Scotland Act, as a result of a Tory Lords’ amendment carried against the Callaghan government’s fierce opposition by just one vote, provided that if Scottish MPs had been decisive in a vote on issues which didn’t concern Scotland, there should be a 14-day cooling-off period and a second vote, to allow reconsideration.Taking a distinctly sniffy attitude to the idea of “In and Out”, the Constitution Unit, in its report on devolution last year, approvingly quoted Enoch Powell’s somewhat mystical remark, made in the 1978 debates on Scottish home rule, that “the nature of this House is that it is a body corporate What concerns any part of us concerns us all. This, the so-called “In and Out” solution, is hardly a new idea, though it is a real answer. In the short term this has disadvantages for both Lib Dems – currently sitting for territorially huge, sparsely populated seats – and for Labour, with the risk of “warfare” in the remaining constituencies.That fear may be exaggerated; won’t the Scottish parliament itself open up just the kind of alternative career path for Labour politicians that would prevent that happening?Less formally, the Lib Dems have floated the idea that Scottish MPs should exclude themselves from voting on issues which in Scotland are the province of the Scottish parliament. And that’s, er, it.The Lib Dems, by contrast, have proposed that the anomaly would be eased by reducing the present 72 Scottish MPs – who currently represent 55,000 voters on average – to a number proportionately closer to the English, who represent 68,000 on average. The Government’s line, so far, is that all the question exposes is a potential anomaly in the British constitution, that the constitution is full of anomalies, and anyway no one objected to Northern Ireland MPs voting on mainland issues.