How to ensure the Union ends with mourning

Those photographs of North Koreans wailing, weeping and gnashing their teeth in grief over the death of Kim Jong-il have suddenly become a little more explicable. Apparently people not observed to be extremely distraught faced six months in a labour camp.

Perhaps we could introduce a similar stricture for when the Scotch people vote to be independent of the United Kingdom. That might put an end to the various street parties currently being organised with festive finger food, paper hats and dancing south of the border. Such celebrations would be unbecoming and ungracious, at least in public.

I am not sure that it was wise of David Cameron to pick a fight with Alex Salmond over the timing of the referendum: it is a battle which in the short term he cannot possibly win. The notion that he is cunningly ensuring that by interfering more Scots will feel inclined to vote for independence is a level of Machiavellian duplicity one would have thought beneath him, no?