It was Queen Victoria who developed Britain’s taste for all things tartan, in the mid-19th century. Ranald MacDonald, the managing director of the Scottish Boisdale club in Belgravia – the only place to be in London on Burns Night – explains: “When Victoria visited Balmoral in the 1850s, she had all her subjects dressed in tartan Most of them had never seen tartan before. It’s something that came from the Highlands with the clan system and the kilt.” Whereas the Highlands and the Lowlands had seen themselves as separate, often antagonistic races, these royal favours amalgamated them in the public imagination. “Now, you go into a Scottish tourist shop and find it full of tartans,” continues Ranald. “The Scots have taken on board everything they once abhorred.”Today, fortunately for the Scots (although some will not see it like that), the country has been endorsed by another royal benefactor. St Andrews University, once famous for nothing more glamorous than Oxbridge rejects and golf, has seen its admissions applications rise by 44 per cent due to what it calls “the Prince William effect”.

According to sources at the university, the surge has been particularly notable in applications from young women, particularly from the United States.This comes as no surprise to Ranald. “Scots are better looking and stronger, and a lot cleverer, too,” he says. “Strictly speaking we’re genetically superior.”As if it needed it, this modest claim has been backed by the new royalty, Madonna, who dredged up her husband Guy Ritchie’s Scottish credentials to qualify her for a Scottish wedding. “My husband and I are both obsessed with history,” she said, “and we wanted to go to a place that had history It was truly magical. The Scots were great.”As in the past, it is the English and Americans who are obsessing about Scotland.

The Scots, as a race, have never been great at self-promotion. Muriel Gray, on being made rector of Edinburgh University, said, “I am no staunch defender of the couthy heedrum-hodrum brand of marketable mock Scottishness” Irvine Welsh went further. In Trainspotting, he had his hero, Renton, rant that his friends are: “Failures in a country of failures It’s nae good blamin it oan the English for colonising us Ah don’t hate the English They’re just wankers We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by No We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation Ah don’t hate the English They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat.

Ah hate the Scots.”The English, with typically na? fortitude, don’t take it personally. They have always been good at ignoring the antipathy that floods towards them from the north. Despite the fact that the Scots support whichever team is playing against England, those south of the border persist in taking the Scottish to their hearts.Where will it end, this obsession with all things Scots? The fashion world is falling over itself to praise the talents of Alexander McQueen. The kilt has been taken up by everyone from Jean Paul Gaultier to Samuel L Jackson, who wore his on the Parkinson show.