Alex Massie

If you think it's a coincidence that Matt Drudge has put his siren on to blast the 'news' that Condoleezza Rice is the 'front-runner' to be Mitt Romney's running-mate just as Romney's campaign fends off fresh questions about his record at Bain Capital then, my friends, you're charmingly naive. This isn't a serious proposition. It's just a smokescreen. Romney may be many things but he's not wholly daft. He's not going to pick a pro-choice woman who is also, probably, in favour of gay marriage. Nor, alas, does Condi bring a record of achievement to the ticket. As Daniel Larison observes, in typically withering style: Quite. Rice may have a paper record demonstrating some fitness for the position but her actual record is another matter entirely.

A pearl richer than all his tribe who, alas, loved batting not wisely but all too well. If tragedy seems too strong a term for Mark Ramprakash's career there remains ample room for sadness when one considers the fate of the best batsman England has produced since Gooch and Gower announced themselves more than 30 years ago. The answer to the eternal question 'What might have been?’ is rarely less than melancholy but never sadder or more frustrating than when pondering Ramprakash's fate. The outline of his story is familiar to all who've followed English cricket these past 20 years: the most gifted batsman of his generation couldn't find a way of parading those gifts at the highest level.

Past experience demonstrates that Rangers supporters won't find anything funny about this: As I say, Rangers fans are immune, even at this late stage, to even gallows' humour. Everyone else? Well, not so much. After all: If this - and sending Rangers into the stygian depths of Scottish football - constitutes success in the corporate restructuring world one scarcely dares contemplate the horrors of failure.

David Frum offers a useful caution politicians might heed. Amidst the stupidity and vanity of politics it's occasionally worth remembering that government is an impossible business. It is much like George Kennan's description of the hazards faced by even weekend farmers: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbour comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens.

There is a useful political lesson to be drawn from this. Sometimes bluffs are called.

The notorious splitters in the Free Presbyterian Church are at it again. The Wee Wee Frees (who should not be confused with the more numerous Wee Frees) warn that Scottish independence is a risky ploy since the Act of Union copper-bottomed the protestant faith and any change to that, however well-intentioned, risks wrath and much else besides. It could be ‘a provocation to God’, no less. It might be, you know. Though the SNP has devoted much time and effort to wooing the Catholic hierarchy, the fact remains that modern Scottish nationalism is an almost exclusively secular business.

It is almost invariably the case that whenever anyone favoured by the Guardian-reading classes chooses to accept an honour from Her Majesty the Queen the air is thick with suggestions said chap (for it is usually a fellow) has somehow "sold out". This time it's Armando Iannucci. Well so what? His own explanation - that it was polite to accept an OBE - is all anyone could desire.  But that doesn't excuse this Twitter-spat with Alastair Campbell. Oh sure, Iannucci scores a hit - of the palpable variety - with WMD. But by then he'd already lost the argument.  Of course Iannucci's trite suggestion Bush and Blair marched into Iraq "for no reason" may be the settled view of the majority of British people these days.

There are at least two things at which the British are very good: being jobsworths and complaining about jobsworths. Today's example of this feature of British life comes courtesy of Martha Payne and Argyll & Bute Council. Martha, as you may know if you've read the papers today, listened to the radio, or been on Twitter, is the nine year-old lassie from Lochgilphead who had, until today, published a blog — Never Seconds — cataloguing her school lunches. A suitably esoteric subject for the internet and an unlikely sensation but there you have it. Her blog, boosted by support from the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nick Nairn, reached two million hits in just two months. Each day she published a photograph of her lunch and awarded it marks out of ten for taste and nutrition.