IF you are a Tory MP and the Prime Minister is forced to defend you in the House of Commons, it’s clear that you have been a very naughty boy, and no matter how you look at it, Douglas ‘two jobs’ Ross has brought himself into the public eye in a negative way that he should have imagined.

Did he really think that people wouldn’t notice if he jetted off to Barcelona to pursue his ‘hobby’ and thus missed the Universal Credit debate? (As an SNP member, I have to say that during the debate Mhairi Black did a fine job of kebabbing the Government, as did a lot of her SNP colleagues and numerous Labour MPs who suddenly seem to have found a Corbyn-like voice in defence of the poor.)

Ross could and should have been there to state the views of his constituents, but off he went to earn about £1,400 and rub shoulders with the Barca greats – or maybe he was on a spying mission for Boris Johnson

“Just see what the Catalonia stuff is all about, Dougie,” you can imagine BoJo saying. “I am doing a deal with the Spanish Government to slag off the Catalonian independence mob if they’ll go quiet on Gibraltar in return, but we need some intel from the Camp Nou, okay, yah?”

Or perhaps not.

I have no problem with Ross running the line at a match on a Saturday or Sunday because even Members of Parliament are entitled to do what they like when they have a weekend off. What Ross and others who support him fail to see, however, is that being an MP is not like any other job.

If Ross was a solicitor like Craig Thomson or a teacher like Willie Collum nobody would bat an eyelid about him having two jobs. But as a Member of Parliament, Ross has a responsibility, indeed a duty, to represent his constituents in the House of Commons.

It doesn’t matter what the votes are about, or what the debate is on any particular day, an MP should at least be available to participate, and not be out of the country working for Uefa.

Ross has also been disingenuous to say the least with his entries in the register of interest for MPs. Alongside each fee that he has declared from the SFA and Uefa he says he has worked 1.5 hours.

That is misleading, because while he may only run the line for 90 or so minutes, he has to be at a match venue in Scotland usually one hour before the match and then stay afterwards for a while.

In European games he must be at the venue at 5pm the evening before the match and stay till the morning afterwards. So that is about 36 hours or more where he is not available to be in Parliament, and that excludes flight durations and other travelling time.

Ross says he will quit after the World Cup because he is a member of a Scottish refereeing team led by Willie Collum that could be selected for Russia next year. That is frankly nonsense, an excuse to enable him to carry on refereeing until next summer.

Was the “Tory insider“ who was quoted at the weekend really trying to tell us that Douglas Ross is a member of a refereeing team that never changes?

Yes, normally Ross will be part of the team led by Collum which also features Frank Connor as the other assistant.

Yet Connor earlier in the season was assistant referee not to Collum but to our other elite referee Thomson for a World Cup qualifying match in Rotterdam in which the Netherlands beat Belarus 4-1. Assistant referees in a team change all the time, so this excuse doesn’t hold water.

In any case, there is little or no chance of two Scottish referees being chosen for the World Cup. Fifa have not yet made the final selection, but it will be known sooner rather than later because all of the officials taking part next summer are going to need intense training in the use of video assistance which Fifa is determined will be introduced for the World Cup.

If Douglas Ross or any other Scottish referee was a full-time professional I would be campaigning for them to be in Russia next year, because that would add to their experience.

The problem is that Scotland does not have full-time professional referees because apparently we cannot afford them.

I think that’s nonsense and the SFA, which has plenty of money in the bank, could easily afford to employ say ten or 12 professional referees at 50k per year who would be expected to be the best of the best, a thorough elite who would rarely make mistakes.

As we saw at the weekend even the best referees like Kevin Clancy can make mistakes though in truth it was Connor who made the error of awarding a penalty to Hibs – a situation which, by the way, could have been rectified very quickly if video assistance had been available to Clancy.

The game is changing, video assistance is coming, and refereeing standards will need to be better than ever in future and that is why we need full-time professional referees in Scotland.

In the meantime, Douglas Ross must accept that his role as an assistant referee is something that must be confined to the weekend, otherwise he must choose between Parliament or the pitches of Europe, and make that choice as soon as the selection of referees for Russia is made.