Ron Mckay: How the wallopers will get their revenge on the sassenach over Culloden street names

I may not be taking it seriously but the locals are. Inverness councillors are vowing “only over my dead body” (a historical pledge, never made good sadly) but the local community council is right behind the controversial naming, with its long-time chair David McGrath opining about the grisly Duke of Cumberland’s role in Culloden and the aftermath, “He won the game so he should get a mention. People might not like it up here, the tartan wallopers.”

You might have divined that McGrath is not a local. He hails from London and has allegedly described himself as a “white settler”. But he’s a man who speaks his mind, is McGrath, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that his fellow councillors have been dropping like, well, Culloden corpses, from the Smithton and Culloden Community Council, which has often struggled to be quorate. I predict that this will change at the next meeting on Tuesday week and that the wallopers will get their revenge on the sassenach.

ENTERING THE PARLIAMENTARY BUBBLE

It’s a little-known fact that Members of Parliament and their staffs have to pass through an important procedure before they can enter the Westminster bubble for the first time. It begins in Portcullis House, across the road from the parliament, close to the weeping fig trees which cost £200,000 a year on hire, at the bottom of the escalator that takes them under the road to Westminster Bridge and then to the ancient cloisters, to the decrepit, vermin-infested building. It is the wormhole which takes them into another dimension where reality is what they imagine it to be and the world outside no longer exists. Inside it’s a bit like The Truman Show. They even speak another language. I think it’s called cobblers. We can all watch from the outside but, unfortunately, we can’t pierce the bubble.

At least in The Truman Show there was a route to row out of it, inside this one there’s just a sculling in circles, making absolutely no progress on Brexit, although the refreshments are still cut-price. But enough of this filmic metaphor, so here’s a TV one. Blackadder is always good. I thought of Baldrick and his cunning plan, but there isn’t one, just the same old oft-rejected one. General Melchett sums it up perfectly: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

FOR WHOM THE PELL TOLLS

More than a hundred mainstream journalists in Australia face jail – and I can hear the murmurs of “a good thing too” – over the case of the paedophile cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic cleric convicted of child abuse. They referred, tangentially and not naming him, to worldwide reports of the trial which did finger him, and because there was to be a second trial in Oz on similar charges they have been accused of contempt of court.

There has been a surprising outpouring of support, not for the hacks, but for Pell, with Murdoch papers arguing that he was wrongly convicted, and that the beast was actually a nice chap. The former Australian prime minister John Howard was among those providing character references.

I’ll just leave you with the argument from Pell’s lawyer Robert Richter seeking bail, redefining the description pure vile. He put it that the rape of one 13-year-old boy was “no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating”. Vanilla rape, not Scotch Bonnet! Really Richter, how do you sleep?

A SHARP BR-EXIT

You came, you saw, you conquered, you left sharpish in the night without a word of goodbye. Oh Brendan we hardly knew you.

Celtic fans have rather more strident opinions on their late manager (they feel rodgered, is a polite way of putting it) who was the highest-paid one in the country, on some £45,000 a week it’s said, with personal worth, according to rich lists, of more than £10 million. Brendan Rodgers, the David Brent of football, will add to his wealth considerably now he has flitted to Leicester, a place formerly most famous for launching the Extreme Ironing World Championships. He’ll probably buy up most of the town with his spare change, adding to his already extensive property portfolio.

Just over three years ago it emerged he and his then wife Susan own 102 buy-to-lets in England, stretching from Tyne and Wear to Reading, so at least he’ll now be nearer to collect the rents and manage the changeovers!

During the couple’s divorce it cost £32,000 just to get them valued. They were then owned through the couple’s company, Maltina Limited, but since the split Brent, rather Rodgers, is the sole director and shareholder. According to the company’s latest “filleted unaudited financial statements “ – brief and not exactly edifying, as the heading suggests – Maltina has net current assets of £1,453, 385. However, Brent owes the company £1,469,920, or about a month’s wages in the new job.

Rodgers is a former manager of Liverpool so perhaps he got the bug to build a property portfolio from the example of the club’s legendary striker, about who fans used to sing, “We all live in a Robbie Fowler house”. The chant is somewhat different at Parkhead.

THE FULL NELSON

Fraser Nelson, the former Scotsman copy boy, now the editor of the Spectator, which I believe is a magazine for opticians, last week posted on Twitter a snap of Jacob Rees-Mogg selling American ice creams to punters at the London Palladium where, apparently, he netted £403 in 20 minutes. I was sure Rees-Mogg had a nanny for these mundane tasks. Well, now he has Fraser.

TRUMP THE WAR HERO

Donald Trump was in Hanoi on a failed jaw-jaw mission with Kim Jong-un while his former lawyer Michael Cohen was alleging, back home, that he was a liar, a racist, a fornicator, a braggart, a conman, all of which seemed only to further endear him to his Republican colleagues and electoral base. Trump might have ended up in Vietnam around 50 years earlier had he not managed to secure four educational military draft deferments and then a medical one for bone spurs in his heels, diagnosed by a doctor whose name he cannot recall, whose written testimony seems to have disappeared from military records, as has the ailment itself from the patient. Trump disgracefully dissed the late John McCain, who did fight in the Vietnam War, as a war hero “because he was captured”. Now that Trump’s been shot down in Hanoi he’ll probably claim that he’s now a war hero.

THE DAY I RUSHDIE JUDGMENT

It’s 30 years on since the publication of The Satanic Verses, the book by Salman Rushdie which Muslims at the time accused of being blasphemous, with copies being burned in the streets, leading, in February 1989, to a fatwa on the author by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For almost 10 years Rushdie was then under UK police protection, although that neither stopped him writing or publicising his works throughout the (non-Muslim) world, accompanied by two armed close protection cops, all paid for by the British taxpayer. I met him once in that time, and what a thoroughly unpleasant and vicious blathering cove he turned out to be. It was in the green room of a Seattle radio station and he was loudly slandering a friend of mine who was at the time being interviewed on air next door. So I got up and told him that if he was any kind of man he’d try repeating what he was saying behind his back to the subject’s face when he came out. Rushdie obviously wasn’t used to having his opinions questions, he stammered, spluttered, went red in the face and finally spat out “F--k off”. I congratulated him on his eloquence. I did consider challenging him to a square go outside, but decided that the odds, me against him and his two ‘handers’, weren’t great, so I sat back down and smiled at him until it was time to go.