There is a large pile of letters on the desk in front of me, provoked by an article I wrote in the Daily Mail in June about my countrymen's dominance in today's Britain. I argued that the number of Scots in the Blair government and the media had turned the traditional relationship between the Scots and the English on its head. Once we Scots were seen as the perfect deputies, trusted to run the day-to-day management of Britain and the empire while all the difficult decisions were taken by the English. Now the Scots dominate Britain's power elite, and a political class which learned its arguments and its loyalties north of the border has swept in to seize the commanding heights of British society.
The postman came two days later, and the letters haven't stopped since. They make fascinating reading. The man who tried to prove, with liberal quotations from the book of Revelation, that the Scots are God's chosen people was, well, a revelation, and the woman who said she had stopped eating shortbread as an organised boycott of Scottish goods may well have been pulling my leg, though I fear not.
But the others, which are still arriving from Essex, Dorset, Somerset, Cumbria and Surrey, are very different. In their own way they all tell the same story: that English people are getting increasingly fed up about being bossed around by the Scots. "We stood together during the second world war," one said. "Now half of you want to go off and be independent, and the other half want to lord it over England."
A few years ago my reaction to this would have been like that of most Scots: "Aye, right." But now I'm not so sure.
Last week I was hissed at by an old lady. The scene was one of London's most respectable clubs, where I was speaking about my book On the Make: How the Scots took over London. As part of my speech on how my countrymen had completed a tartan takeover of British society I ran through an impressive list of top Scottish politicians. Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling, John Reid? and then it came, from a respectably dressed woman in the front row. A splendid, spirited hiss, like that delivered to a pantomime villain. It was a Pavlovian response to the name of a politician who has come to embody Tam Dalyell's West Lothian question, the Scottish politician who runs an English department of state but is responsible only to his Scottish constituents.
It wasn't the first time I had witnessed the electric effect that mentioning Reid could have on an English audience. Last November, as the only journalist at the inaugural public meeting of the Campaign for an English Parliament, I watched as Reid's name provoked a chorus of hearty booing. Conway Hall, in central London, was packed to the rafters with English patriots who believed that their country, once the green and pleasant heart of the United Kingdom, had become the underdog in Blair's devolved quango state.
Nor is that view confined to the right. When Anthony Sampson published Who Runs This Place? earlier this year, a revision of his 1962 Anatomy of Britain, one of the major changes he noted was that "the Scots are everywhere in England." We may only account for 8 per cent of the British population but we punch well above our weight.
The conventional view of the relationship between the Scots and English says that whereas a good few of my fellow countrymen dislike the English, the English are by and large cheerily tolerant of the legions of Scottish doctors, journalists, engineers, policemen and politicians that end up in positions of power in England.
But things might be changing. Until the hapless Iain Duncan Smith got his marching orders, every major British political party was led by a Scot. And there are signs that England is becoming uncomfortable. The snooty response to Michael "Gorbals Mick" Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, would surely never have been voiced in the yah-boo England of the 1980s. And consider the abuse heaped on the drinking and smoking habits of Charles Kennedy.
We have not yet returned to the 1760s, when London was gripped by rampant Scotophobia: Scots were duffed up in the street and sent homewards to think again. These days, it is still safe to walk the streets paved with gold. But for how much longer?
The Gordon Brown succession, assuming it happens, is when we will truly discover the extent of the post-devolution English backlash. Will English conservatism be roused against two of its traditional enemies - socialism and Scotsmen - conveniently embodied in the same saturnine son of the manse? Will Scotophobia remain a kind of joke, taken seriously only by a few extreme English nationalists and the shortbread-boycotters from the suburbs? Or will the West Midlands, the heartland of English nationalism and home to a large number of marginal seats, turf Brown out at the first opportunity?
