Further from where I write than France languishes a small European country of which we English know little. Politically troubled — ad hoc coalitions of an uninspiring sort seem to be her fate — this country is floundering. Her economy is flatlining, her major industries are shrinking and her self-confidence is thin.

Her difficulties are chronic rather than dramatic and nor are they recent. They have not been caused by her governments: it would fairer to complain only that her political class has lacked the boldness or originality to confront them. Boxed in by economic stagnation, few there seem ready to think their way out of the box, and for many years now there has been a tendency for the best of her citizens to emigrate, leaving (in politics at least) the mediocre behind.

But beyond this country’s borders, few know and fewer seem to care. Her population is small and has diminished over the past 25 years. Her politicians are not so much blind to these problems as too dull and timid to face them.

Yet this is a proud nation. Because one of her greatest resources is her sense of national identity, the maintenance of a large nationalism on a slender human population and shaky economic base can give her affairs a pantomime quality in the eyes of outsiders, and news of her government rarely makes it into the headlines except when things go wrong in a sufficiently tinpot way to raise a laugh abroad; or when her politics impacts on that of her immediate neighbours.

Scotland is drifting away. As with missing persons, the first you know is when it occurs to you that you cannot recall seeing or hearing of them for quite some time. We get a troubling sense of Man Overboard.

From north of the border the obvious riposte is “that’s your problem”. The London newspapers can, if we like, describe Scotland as having gone away, but the country has not moved an inch. Scotland is where she always was, her own citizens know how to find their way home, and how associated the English may feel is up to the English and of no concern to the Scottish people.

That response will not do. How associated the English feel with Scotland matters because, in the most fundamental of respects, the government of Scotland is still situated in England. London does not lack power over Scotland: London lacks interest in Scotland. Third Way devolution, in which Scotland is encouraged to believe that it is another country without being given the means to be another country, may be leaving the Scots the worst of both worlds. To this I shall return.

First, though, let me illustrate my claim that Scotland has dropped out of our news. Note that word “our”. There is nothing new in the arrogant English assumption of ownership of the news, and before devolution the Scots could fairly complain that their affairs were viewed only from London. After devolution, however, the complaint is that increasingly they are not viewed at all.

This is not to say that good national newspapers do not have good reporters in Scotland and good Scottish editions for sale on the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh; but much that makes these editions does not make it into the English paper. Write leaders from Edinburgh in a national paper, and you write for the Scottish edition alone. Here in London the tendency is to have one of two specifically Scottish commentators who, almost like a newspaper’s foreign editor, do their stuff. Scottish stuff.

Stuff on which we English encroach with some hesitation. When proposing to my editors that I should write this column I had to check myself in mid-sentence saying: “Do you think Magnus (Linklater) would mind?” — as though one were, for instance, proposing to write a column on opinion-sampling without asking Peter Riddell. Scotland is coming to be regarded as the province of specialists, and when during the last election I suggested writing election sketches from Scottish constituencies I was aware of a feeling that an English journalist should not “tread on the toes” of colleagues north of the border.

Often, when Scottish news does make it into the mainstream part of the national media, the visa such a story requires is a London dimension. When Henry McLeish, the First Minister of Scotland at the time, resigned dramatically over an office rents scandal, the BBC and Channel 4 ran the story as a “new Labour unravels” tale — as though the news that Scotland’s most senior politician had quit was somehow not quite enough to qualify it for prominence.

Policy initiatives emanating from Scotland’s own Government are rarely well reported, except when they seem to challenge the English approach. News that anything — pensioners’ care, eye tests, tuition fees — for which the English pay, may be made free in Scotland, does pass national news editors’ tests, but only as a potential “clash” with England. Otherwise the journos’ phrase is that anyone with a story from Scotland must “take its kilt off” (that is, report it shorn of its special provenance) to get it into the paper.

The alternative news peg is — conversely — to dress it in such an extravagant kilt as to turn it into “local colour”. Folksiness, cuteness, absurdity, or anything which evokes the response “isn’t that just typical of those pesky Celts?” qualifies on the ground of colourful curiosity. When Scotland’s Deputy Justice Minister described striking firemen (nationally) as fascists, the story reached the national press. The ballooning costs of the Scottish Parliament building are, likewise, easy to find space for. Childish or backstabbing rows in the Edinburgh Parliament are always good copy, as is corruption. The picture — by turns idiotic or quaint — which we English who look in from outside are encouraged to see was described by Deborah Orr in the (Scottish) Sunday Herald recently: “A little country needlessly micromanaged by incompetent, hysterical, nit-picking little men.”