HAVING already shown their vulgar side by clapping in the House of Commons – a crime which brought a sharp rebuke from speaker John Bercow – SNP MPs were in the doghouse again last week for the twin sins of whistling and humming during the Commons vote on triggering Article 50.

The tune was from the final movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony, though I don't imagine many of the honourable members were aware of that. Hard to imagine there's much room for Ludwig van B on Spotify playlists choked with Jimmy Shand, Biffy Clyro and 100 turgid versions of A Man's A Man For A' That. But I could be wrong.

The MPs will have known its popular name, though – Ode To Joy. It's the anthem of the EU, which is why they were whistling and humming it.

Addressing North Ayrshire and Arran MP Patricia Gibson, who was taking the concept of multi-tasking to a whole new level by checking her phone and conducting the choir – truly they are a gifted bunch on that side of the House – Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle bellowed: “Order! I personally don't mind singing, but I certainly can't allow it in the chamber because before we know it we could hear other tunes. And I don't want to get into that.”

He might not but I do. I want to hear other tunes and I think that having let the cat's chorus out of the bag, the SNP MPs should make this act of civil disobedience a regular occurrence. So I say “Yes!” to a rendition of I Want To Hold Your Hand when Prime Minister Theresa May is at the despatch box. “Yes!” to a burst of Only The Lonely when Labour's solo Scottish MP Ian Murray is on his feet. “Yes!” to Another One Bites The Dust every time a member of the Opposition front bench resigns. And “Hell, yeah! to The Imperial Death March from Star Wars whenever a Tory backbencher tries to big up the benefits of that other union, the one 45 per cent of Scots don't want any more.

PS. Memo to Donald: I think the SNP MPs' rendition of Ode To Joy could justifiably be referred to as a massacre. Why not add it to that list of dubious terrorist atrocities you came up with recently?

I'VE probably spent more time wondering what really is on an SNP MP's Spotify playlist than I've ever spent wondering what the “real” Mr Darcy might have looked like. Which is to say I've spent no time on it at all. Anyway, Jane Austen has already told us the only two things any woman needs to know about the Pride And Prejudice hottie: what his “mien” looks like (“noble” apparently) and what he has in his trousers (£10,000 a year).

Undeterred by that fulsome, precise and comprehensive physical description, TV historian Amanda Vickery and English professor John Sutherland have teamed up for a documentary in which they examine the real life characters who might have inspired Darcy, and look at the ideas of male attractiveness which prevailed at the time. Then they handed over their findings to an artist who created a portrait of this awesome specimen of early 19th-century masculinity. And behold, the “real” Mr Darcy: an effete looking creature with a long nose, pointy chin, sloping shoulders and collar-length hair powdered white. Ain't he buff?

But while we're on the subject of facile literary conjecture, here's what I really want to know: if this Mr Darcy had gone on a lad's fortnight in Magaluf with his friend Mr Bingley, what would he have had tattooed on his buttock by the time he flew home?

A YOUTUBE video featuring comedian Melissa McCarthy has racked up nearly 20 million views since last weekend. No, she didn't get to do the half-time bit in the Superbowl and no it isn't an illegal stream of the all-female Ghostbusters in which she stars, though both would be worth watching. Instead it's a clip from US comedy institution Saturday Night Live in which she plays much-ridiculed White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer as an unhinged, gum-chewing Angry Person who likes to pick up his podium and attack journalists with it.

The programme has already enraged Donald Trump and his ever-itchy Twitter finger because of Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin's, merciless send-up of the President on the show. Now, according to sources including CNN, the Donald is annoyed that Spicer is getting the same treatment.

Proof that vicious satire can have an effect? Maybe. We'll have to wait and see. At the very least it's making America's coastal-dwelling metropolitan elites feel better about being ruled over by a mendacious, p****-grabbing, orange-faced demagogue.

THERE isn't much I have in common with David Beckham OBE. I've never had Fergie kick a football boot anywhere near me and accidentally draw blood. The only halfway line I've ever scored from was in FIFA 13, a feat accomplished from the comfort of my sofa. I don't have a tattoo of my wife's name misspelled in Sanskrit on my arm. And I've never gone to a wedding dressed in burgundy velvet knickerbockers, tights and white ballet shoes (though as Beckham revealed on Desert Island Discs recently, he was only six at the time).

Oh, and I've never had my emails hacked either, which brings us to the one thing we do have in common: neither of us is likely to be given a knighthood any time soon, though unlike him the lack of it won't make me label the honours committee “unappreciative” and a bunch of “****s”. I'd just think they hadn't seen me scoring from the halfway line in FIFA 13.

Beckham's surliness about his sirlessness is reportedly related to the fact he was “red-flagged” (red carded, surely?) by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in 2013 over his investment in a scheme HMRC said amounted to lawful tax avoidance. A court action arguing otherwise is ongoing.

Beckham's angry email response to the knock-back (see above) was uncovered in the recent leak of emails hacked from Doyen Sports, a Portugal-based sports management agency. These were subsequently published on website Football Leaks.

Quoted in the Daily Mirror, a Beckham spokesman said the leaks consisted of “outdated material taken out of context from hacked and doctored private emails from a third party server giving a deliberately inaccurate picture”. The paper also quoted an unnamed source said to be a close friend of Beckham's: “Genuinely, he wasn’t as vitriolic as that, but you do say some things in private and in the heat of the moment,” they said. “To be honest, he does feel that he has given so much to his country. And sometimes you say things in private that anyone would say and you don’t really mean it.”

Still, if you listen hard over the SNP Parliamentary Barber Shop Quintet humming Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, you can just about hear the sound of Brand Beckham starting to creak.