Robert Burns gets the Harvey Weinstein treatment

IT’S Burns Night next Thursday but fans of the poet must ditch the haggis, the neeps, the tatties and absolutely no cock-a-leekie. For the great Robbie Burns, the national bard of Scotland, has been outed as a tartan Harvey Weinstein by Scots poet Liz Lochhead.

Having died in 1796 he’s in no fit state to answer these charges which come as a result of a letter in which he seems to boast about raping his pregnant girlfriend Jean Armour by giving her a “thunderous scalade”. Great word, by the way. Scalade.

As is now the custom in cases of this kind Robert Burns must be referred to henceforth as “the disgraced Robert Burns”. On New Year there will be no “auld lang syne”, no more declarations that your love is “like a red, red rose”, and no more rueful admissions that “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley”.

One day when the insane witch hunt against men has been called off we may once again turn to Burns’s poems (if any survive the ritual book burning) and read again his famous lines (forgive the English translation): “Oh would some Power the gift to give us, To see ourselves as others see us, It would from many a blunder free us.”