Alex Massie

Last month I wrote a post arguing that an awful lot of opinion polling is worthless. The public mood matters - and measuring it is important - but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless. Well, whaddyaknow, but here's a new Ipsos-Mori survey which confirms my suspicions. The Great British Public may have many virtues and they may be able to tell you that poor Mr Clegg is a wrong 'un but when you peak beneath the bonnet you begin to fear that newspaper comment threads may not be quite as unrepresentative of the general public as you'd like to think they must be.

Dunblane yesterday evening and, an hour after Andy Murray has won the men's singles title at Wimbledon, the streets are still thronged with cheerful revellers. Smiles and saltires abound. Locals and visitors cluster for photographs around the golden letterbox commemorating Murray's Olympic triumph last year. Journalists have been despatched to pen colour pieces from Murray's home town. On the Stirling road two young girls, one sporting a saltire as a kind of sari, hold up a poster of the local hero; every passing car honks its horn in celebratory salutation. The boy has done it. Not bad, not bad at all. This morning, acres of newsprint are devoted to Murray's victory. It is, as you might have heard, the first time in 77 years that a British man has won Wimbledon.

Max Hastings is one of the foremost military historians in the English-speaking world. His multi-volume history of the Second World War is magnificent. Until recently, however, I had not known that he counted soothsaying among his many accomplishments. How else, however, to explain his article in today's Daily Mail in which the old boy outs himself as a first-class mind-reader. Hastings is responding to a presentation Alastair Campbell gave to an audience of PR types in Australia in which Mr Blair's communications wizard, perhaps rather too glibly, noted that Winston Churchill frequently and deliberately peddled untruths during the Second World War. And yet his reputation remains higher than that of poor old Tony!

Earlier this week, I was part of a panel on Newsnight Scotland discussing the latest - some would say, belated - efforts designed to improve Glasgow's dismally underachieving state schools. That they need improvement is beyond doubt. In Scotland's largest city, only 7% of state-educated pupils leave school with five good Higher passes. In Scotland as a whole a mere 220 children from the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods achieved three As at Higher (the minimum grades required for admission to leading universities such as St Andrews). As I said on the programme, this should be considered a national scandal. More than that, a disgrace. (Like Fraser, I wish more people were angry about these things.) To be fair, Glasgow City Council is trying.

The British Army may never go to war again. Not because it is under-resourced and over-stretched but because, as of today, it may no longer be able to afford casualties. That, at any rate, is one thought prompted by the Supreme Court's extraordinary - to my mind - ruling that dead soldiers' families can sue the ministry of Defence for damages. According to the Supreme Court justices, the MoD may have been negligent in its "duty of care" and, consequently, the families may sue the government for failing, apparently, to safeguard the human rights of soldiers killed in Iraq (and, presumably, elsewhere). The court dismissed the MoD's suggestion there might sensibly be "battlefield immunity". I cannot for the life of me understand why. (The whole judgement can be read here.

Boris Johnson makes a strong case in today's Telegraph that even if the west wanted to intervene in the Syrian civil war the point at which is was plausible to do so has long since passed. The benefits of intervention no longer outweigh the risks. Meanwhile, Paul Goodman reiterates that there's no obvious British national interest in intervening. It is difficult to disagree with either analysis. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan is appalled by the Obama administration's decision to offer a modest quantity of modest weaponry to the Syrian opposition. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane, he suggests. Don't be fooled into thinking this will shorten the conflict or save lives, he argues.

It is Selkirk Common Riding today. The biggest, most important, day in my home town's year. A day lent extra significance in 2013 since this is the 500th anniversary of the catastrophe at Flodden Field, a battle still recalled in these parts with a mixture of pride and melancholy. If you listen with due attention you can still hear the hoofbeats of history here. King James IV was the last British monarch killed in battle. As many as 10,000 of his compatriots fell with him that bleak September day in Northumberland. Among them were a handful bishops and many sons of the aristocracy. Scarcely a family in the country was untouched by grief. And few places, so the legends have it, suffered more grievously than the Royal and Ancient Burgh of Selkirk.

Poor old David Cameron has never been blessed with attractive options on the European front. But for a while it was possible to suppose that it might not ruin his career to anything like the degree it helped to scupper the ministries of John Major and Margaret Thatcher. That pretence is over, however. There's a storm coming and Cameron will be shipwrecked on the Belgian coast and that will be that. A few months ago I suggested that all the talk of Tory "unity" on the European question was so much hogwash. The best that could be said was that all these clever ploys and stratagems for renegotiating Britain's membership of the EU had bought Cameron a little time.  But only a little.

To read Douglas Murray's cover story from this week's edition of the magazine (subscribe!) you might think the British government is not only losing the battle against Islamist extremism and Jihadism in this country but that it wants to lose that struggle. I think this is weak but pretty pernicious sauce. But it is the sort of thing that will appeal to some. Especially those with a mania for betrayal. Only the strong and the vigilant and the this-is-how-it-is-chum brigade are tough enough to see the pathetic and craven weaklings currently staffing the government, the legal profession and the civil service for what they really are: the next worst thing to traitors. It is a myth and a bullshit one at that.