This year marks the bicentenary of Burns’s death, and during the celebrations we’ll no doubt hear him described in many other ways; during last week’s Burns Suppers I imagine he was proclaimed as a socialist, a nationalist, an internationalist, a simple ploughman, or – the revisionist view – not quite any of these things. I used to cover Burns Suppers for a local weekly in Lanarkshire and once heard a speech at a golf club which toasted him as a golfer, or perhaps the kind of golfer he would have been, had he played golf. At school we had an English teacher, an Ayrshire man and a great Burns fan who was also a Rechabite and teetotaller. The problem for him was the overwhelming evidence that Burns drank a great deal. The answer for him was denial, “Boys, boys,” he used to say, “as you go through life you will hear that Scotland’s greatest poet was always at the bottle, but Burns was a poor farmer, and I ask you, how could he have been a drunkard on pounds 40 a year?” So we had Burns the total abstainer.The Burns cult now is to attack the Burns cult, if you see what I mean, and the Burns Supper, a Victorian invention often given over to drinking, is taking its share of stick.

My experience as a reporter certainly did not endear me to them They were hardly poetic events. I hope, though, that the Barrhead Burns Club still exists and is telling its annual joke. Barrhead, a small town south of Glasgow, had as its principal industry the manufacture of lavatories by the great firm of Shanks. Before the haggis made its musical entry on Burns night, the club chairman would stand up and say: “And now, gentlemen, the haggis. It will be piped in by the Reverend Angus McShuggle and later piped out by Shanks.” A joke, though my old English teacher would not agree, in the finest Burns tradition.. IT SHOULD have been a marvellous week for Labour, on a subject where the party is historically strong.

The results of the first national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds were to be published, showing that more than half the children had failed to reach the expected standard. John Major’s strange, muddled scheme to give parents vouchers for nursery education was to be debated in the House of Commons. University vice-chancellors, furious over funding cuts, were ready to talk openly about students, or their parents, having to pay hundreds of pounds a year in tuition fees. Instead, the party found itself on the defensive in a mega-row over schools. For a time, the controversy over Harriet Harman’s decision to send her child to a selective school threatened to tear apart the fragile unity between “old” and “new” Labour.