Another Scottish Bond? Sam has a licence to kilt

Outlander star Sam Heughan says it would be a “dream job” to be cast as the new James Bond.

The 40-year-old, from Dumfriesshire, jokingly asked Phillip and Holly, “Who doesn’t want to see another Scottish Bond?”, which probably caused an outage on This Morning’s switchboard.

Sam auditioned for the Bond role in 2005 but lost out to Daniel Craig.

Right, it’s his time now. He’s got all the right credentials – looks, muscles, a winning personality, an unmistakable twinkle in the eye…

Sorry, got a bit distracted there.

Oh yeah, he’s a great actor too.

Hand over the dinner jacket, 007 – the name’s Heughan, and he’s licensed to kilt.

And that, in itself, is no small achievement. I mean, everyone knows mothers do the majority of the work for the minority of the praise (suck it up, dads, you know it’s the truth) but being a real father, an inspiring and benevolent role model, during an age where traditional roles and gender and identity are no longer clearly defined can’t be the easiest of gigs.

I lost my dad as a teenager but I often find myself wondering how he would have coped in modern-day Scotland, an old-school Glasgow shipyard worker in a “woke” world where it can be difficult to keep up with what’s acceptable and what’s not.

And where, if you find yourself asking what “woke” means, it means you’re already behind the times.

Would he have struggled and railed against the so-called “enlightenment”? Or would he have adapted, because times change and people must change with them in order to avoid being left behind. I like to think it would have been the latter.

Being a “dad” isn’t just becoming a father, it’s a process. The best learn skills and values early, and carry on learning from kids as they go along.

We have, running our nation, a man who refuses to admit to the number of children he has. We do know that some have been produced through extramarital affairs and that he went to court to try to keep the existence of one daughter secret. He failed, ’cause even the judge could see that the public had a right to know the kind of man they were dealing with.

Boris Johnson has just produced another – baby son