• Curiouser and curiouser in Scotland, where canny Alex Salmond has been bigging up the Ukip threat in the hope of dragging some Muslims, ethnic minorities and lefties into the SNP's "progressive Scotland" camp and winning a third Euro seat in the process. Salmond's visit to a Friday mosque, in the name of "the diversity of modern Scotland", enraged Ukip, which thinks it has a monopoly on sharp tactics. Polls claim 18% of Scots would be more likely to vote for independence if Salmond-basher Farage wins the UK's Euro elections.

• But lo! Wednesday's Scotsman published a Dundee University/Survation poll purporting to show Scots are as keen as the heathen Sassenachs on Ukip's "nasty politics" (copyright A Salmond), such as stricter immigration and benefit controls, and less human rights law or foreign aid. Even Ukip's core demand to leave the EU has 31.5% SNP support. So "progressive Scotland" may be a pub myth, though fair-minded Scots explain it's the messenger, not the message that Jocks don't like. Still, one in three wanting to leave both the UK and EU is impressively North Korean.

• Before you read this, just stop and concentrate on your breathing. Security staff at Westminster were immensely puzzled this week when they found a pair of Tibetan meditation bells in a visitor's briefcase. Consternation moments later when they found two more! But no, it was not a Free Tibet plot, just two mindfulness teachers, Ed Halliwell and Tessa Watt, who carry them everywhere in their backpacks to start and end sessions. They were attending a workplace mindfulness discussion hosted by Labour's Chris Ruane. Count us in, overstressed security staff told the pair.

• Baffling behaviour at Wednesday's London Press Club awards lunch from Not-Sir-Paul-Dacre. The Mail's part-time, OAP editor (£1m a year for a four-day week) swept in stage left at the Stationers' Hall to give the Londoner of the Year award to Doreen Lawrence. If you were Labour candidate for mayor, the Mail might back you, he threatened her. Then he swept off stage right. It left 300 diners gasping, all except those who realised that the top prize was about to be given (second year running too) to Dacre's rival and weekly tormentor. Geordie Greig, author of a money-and-sex book about Lucian Freud, edits the Mail on Sunday. Posh boy Geordie's editorial tone does not embarrass Lady Rothermere, the brains behind both papers' proprietor (No 101 in the Sunday Times list of billionaire oligarchs). Lady R is keen for Greig to get Dacre's job when the old boy retires to his Scottish estate to count his cash.

• They like to water grudges in football. As Brazil's World Cup looms, England's ex-keeper Peter Shilton still nurses one against Diego Maradona's "hand of God" foul, which helped put England out of the 1986 cup. He tells World in Motion mag that what still makes him unwilling to shake that hand is that Maradona didn't own up afterwards and say, "'Yes, I did cheat and I apologise.' A great player should have been big enough to say that." It would never happen in politics.

• Mainstream parties have finally noticed that there's no point in calling Nigel Farage a racist, sexist, bone-idle imbiber to impress voters who don't care. So Political Scrapbook, the leftie website, may be wasting its time digging up a laddish interview Nige gave to Belgian mag Up Front in 2005. In it the great man ranges over his strategy for beating Princess Anne at tennis ("drink her under the table first") his view of ex-colleague Godfrey Bloom ("a classic henpecked husband") and his horror at the idea of women as frontline soldiers. "Maybe it's because I have got so many women pregnant over the years that I have got a different view" [there are four kids on the official list]. That must be worth a few more votes in Hampstead.

• Eton's headmaster, Tony Little, is stepping down next year and rumour puts a state school-educated chap in line for the job. Little's dad was a baggage handler down the M4 at Heathrow, but Tony won a scholarship (Eton).

Twitter: @michaelwhite