MAURICE GLASMAN, the flamboyant Labour peer, was among friends in Glasgow on Monday night, where he was addressing a meeting organised by Radical Options for Scotland and Europe (Rose). 

Life at home in Stoke Newington was, however, a little more testing, he said. 

“I’m an academic, I’m Jewish and I’m from north London. Our social life is effectively over.”

But getting out of the bubble had been worth a three-hour wait at Stansted airport, he said — where he was faced with a choice of “Burger King, Giraffe and Leon” to relieve his hunger.

“All the options overpriced and no way out,” he quipped. “I began to see what staying in the EU would actually be like.

“I couldn’t even smoke.”

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KEN MACINTOSH, the Scottish Parliament’s presiding officer, takes a more laissez-faire approach in the chamber than John Bercow. 

But on Thursday he seemed infected by the same playful innuendo we hear at Westminster. 

“The questions and answers were too long this afternoon,” he told MSPs after First Minister’s Questions. 

“We need to revisit that, please, otherwise I will have to cut off members.”

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THE DAILY MIRACLE has continued to cause consternation among Scotland’s commentariat this week, following the fairly standard spectacle of the paper being distributed at Scottish Labour conference. 

Tom Harris, the former MP for my own Glasgow South, made a strong pitch for a corporate rebrand — referring to us as “the f***ing Morning f***ing Star,” which has quite a ring to it. 

In the Times, Alex Massie thundered: “This is the Labour Party now; an entity whose favoured organ is a newspaper founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain and that still, by and large, adheres to that old-time religion.” 

In a letter to the Times yesterday, I reminded Massie that Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and former Times restaurant critic Jonathan Meades have all written for the Star in recent years — and perhaps we’re not the ones who are stuck in the cold war.