Englishman's self-pity jibes spark Highland storm.

Remarks by English London Evening Standard editor Max Hastings really stirred up a hornet's nest in the Highlands. The Falkland Islands war veteran reporter claimed in a magazine article hostility towards the English was on the increase and then followed it all with jibes about Scots wallowing in self-pity - guaranteed to send all self-respecting Highlanders rushing for their claymores!

His article in up-market country pursuits magazine, The Field, said there's a growing schism between the Scots - particularly the Highlanders - and the English who were either regarded as alien colonisers or contemptuously dismissed as white settlers.

According to Mr Hastings, a regular visitor to Highland sporting estates, English families who would once book a lodge for the whole summer now chose to venture north for shorter periods, bringing their food and supplies with them and avoiding contact with local people. All good cage-rattling copy even without the throw-away self-pity jibes. A couple of local newspapers reporting on The Field article dubbed him a Fleet Street grandee which could suggest his views command attention.

Having spent nearly a score of fun years in Fleet Street when Express and Mirror were battling it out, its great days were over before Max Hastings got there. These were the days when Fleet Street's Scots were called the 'Tartan Mafia', tolerated only because we worked quite well when controlled by "white bosses." It was all light-hearted banter then and I suspect it was with impish glee Max Hastings rattled the cages.

He portrays himself as one of the last of the top-drawer toffs who come north with high society shooting parties, their porters laden down with Harrods and Fortnam and Mason food hampers to spare the kitchen staff the hassle of your everyday Tesco's or Co-op supermarkets.

His observation :"Our shiny new cars contrast sharply with the battered village wrecks" begs to be rubbished, because as he well knows, some of the people who drive about the Highlands in mud-encrusted tattered old land rovers could buy and sell him many times over. But to be fair, investigative journalism was never one of the Evening Standard's strong points even when there was a Fleet Street.

But all that aside, remarks by those such as Max Hastings only serve to emphasise the divide which does indeed exist for most people in the Highlands, which separates the rich from the poor and his rich and prosperous southern England with an impoverished and struggling Highlands of Scotland.