I'm still working my way through Alastair Campbell's diaries. Here's an entry from 1995 when Tony Blair was leader of the opposition.
"We spent a lot of the day doing Scottish media, which was always risky because when it came to the Scottish press, TB and I were both hopeless at hiding our irritation at them."
Campbell believes the Scottish media found him and Blair irritating because despite their Scottish heritage (Blair was born in Edinburgh) they were viewed as ultra-English by Scottish hacks.
He adds: "There is a 'culture of grievance' element to all the media, but the Jocks have it with knobs on. GB (Gordon Brown) called and TB said to him he'd had a day full of whingeing Jock journos saying they wanted devolution and they wanted no tax and they wanted Scotland to get more money and they wanted to win the World Cup and why was I stopping them?"
No news yet on whether that culture of grievance is confined to Celtic hacks in one part of the UK, but I do still have a few hundred pages to get through.
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