THE JOB of Secretary of State for Scotland is not what once it was. The big desk is tidy, most Mondays. What with all the devolution stuff, no one is asking you, unless they are truly having a laugh, to pretend to run a country. You are only required to be decorative.

And that other thing. Was it mentioned at your interview? Apparently you are supposed to speak up, now and then, in the national interest.

How you choose to interpret the last duty is a personal matter, of course. You might say, "Poll tax? Why not?" You could say: "Recession? Mass unemployment? Lead me to the by-election." Or you could advertise an interest in the national game.

I don't know much - ancient joke alert - about football. I'm a Hibs supporter; share my pain. I know a slight amount, nevertheless, about secretaries of state for Scotland, and what is expected of them.

Pathetic loyalty and "the government of the day" tend to be good places to start. In that world, Scotland is at the other end of the track. In this world, we have Olympic Games.

Tessa Jowell, currently the minister responsible for all the missing billions, apparently wishes she could have her time again. Perhaps, she says wistfully, London 2012 was not such a good idea. Perhaps it was a Russell Brand joke. But never fear, Jim Murphy is here.

Like his boss at No 10, Mr Murphy still refuses to grasp why we hicks in the sticks might fail to enthuse over a Team GB. He calls and he raises. He seeks "guarantees" from Fifa folk whom I would not wish to see in the vicinity of a used car. Then he talks up the unifying Celtic-British theme.

So can we, as the politicians might say, go back to basics? Here's Team GB. If you are very lucky, and if his knees hold out, one haphazard Man U midfielder might just be on the bench to carry the hopes of a nation. Alex Ferguson has declined the stooge's coaching honour. Should I then wave a flag?

Face it: you want me to support an English team? It won't happen. And the minister responsible for my region thinks I am deplorable for declining the honour? This is not how football, down the ages and across the oceans, works. It. Won't. Happen. The pebble at my heel has to do with those, Mr Murphy included, who pretend not to know the facts as they affect our "home nations". Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland get no guarantees from Fifa, and never have done. This is not a secret.

We exist, failing a change in the constitutional weather, on sufferance. We are not a nation, officially, any of us. Sections of the Fifa "family" refuse even to understand the historic anomaly that allows Scottish blue or Welsh red. Were we green republican Irish (or equivalent) the issue would not arise. But that's another story.

Mr Murphy's eagerness to play new Labour politics in this context is predictable, but sad. Is our survival as a footballing entity to be put at risk because Gordon Brown needs a headline and Murphy has a new non-job? Apparently so.

I could support Armenia instead. I have reasons. Or how about San Marino? Malta show promise. I could also follow any available political party. And then become, in one of my dreams, Secretary of State for Scotland.

Here's a sentence I don't type every week: God bless the SFA. What did the suits say last week, after all? Tell them, as one used to say, to chase themselves. Fifa and Downing Street and Dover House. Get lost.

The very notion of a Team GB mistakes the reality of Scottish football, far less the truths of Scottish life. We will not go into that oblivion. It is not who we are. Or as Mr Murphy forgot to ask by accident: who will turn up, exactly, for Team GB? Not, to finish the rhyme without the bad word, me.

A question is begged. Who are we, then? A less-than-adequate national team? A less than real national community? Perhaps so. So would we have inspirational Team GB, or mostly crap little Scotland? Mr Murphy has not thought it through, I believe.

The lawyers will persuade me to defer my thoughts on Jerome Valcke, Fifa's general secretary. The issue of "guarantees" from the global governing body should meanwhile only arise, first, if we think we need those assurances, secondly, if politics has laid its smear over the argument.

Last week, the SFA said this: "We will not do anything that we feel would jeopardise our status as a footballing nation in our own right." Correct, I thought.

Then I wondered: did all those 90-minute patriots just demand extra time? And has Mr Murphy, and most politicians, failed to sense an undercurrent surrounding football in this small country?

Never read too much into the game. On the other hand, never fail to read the stories sport has to tell about a wider world. Why are we so set against Team GB? Why are we so determined to preserve the right never to be much, internationally, now and forever, at football?

The Secretary of State said, last week, that Valcke - don't tempt me, not again - had spoken of a Scotland "protected as a football nation". Thanks, one thought, a bunch. Why was survival ever at risk, and when can I offer my expletive? Does Mr Murphy regard it as a kind of triumph if we are just "protected"?

How cheap does this fight have to get? This cheap: I would rather watch Scotland lose than see England win. I would rather take up golf than watch "Team GB". Base nationalism?

Possibly. Or perhaps my way of existing.

Second rotten joke: I'm not any old depressed existentialist, I'm a Hibs supporter. The Secretary of State can declare peace in our time as often as he wishes, but it will still feel like a surrender to apathy and idiocy.