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By and large, Callaghan has had an indulgent press, but his own judgment of his actions can be found in the nervous breakdown, paralysis of will and complete failure to communicate with civil servants and ministers he suffered across two to three weeks at the end of 1978, going into 1979 – something related to me by his private secretary, Kenneth Crowe, but not included in the standard narrative. The 1970s are perhaps best remembered as a failure so nearly a success as to approach tragedy. And, deep down, everyone in the SNP (outside of the Palace Guard) and everyone in Scotland who is actually paying attention knows that Ms. Sturgeon's legacy is the emptying out of that hope. Over-confidence had been there from the start. Ferguson’s hadn’t built a big ferry or a ship of similar size since 2000 – and never two such big vessels at once – and most of its staff had gone. ‘And here’s McColl saying, “No bother, we’ll build these two ships at the same time,” and he’s taking on people who didn’t have the experience. Apprentices come who can work a computer but they have no one in the yard they can learn shipbuilding from. McColl should have taken things more slowly, built one ship, see where it could be improved, and then built the second.’

Chancellor, Alexander (9 September 2010). "A lost civilisation". Spectator Book Club. Archived from the original on 26 October 2009 . Retrieved 17 October 2010. Complaints came from landowners with political influence as well as crofters with none. In 1919 the factor to Lord Leverhulme, who was on the verge of buying Harris, wrote that for seven weeks from January to March no cargo at all had been landed from Glasgow, with the result that for the last ten days of that time there had been no food in the local shops: ‘the people were without butter or margarine, no sugar, no bacon … The whole position is really becoming quite intolerable … If the government have got the interests of the people at heart, they must begin with the steamer question and reorganise the whole service.’ In the same year the people of Loch Skipport in South Uist complained that a community whose ‘sons and brothers have had to face the hunnish foe in a foreign land for King and Country, should be so exploited by rapacious Steamer Companies’.

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Nettles, willowherbs, brambles: nothing suggested that ocean-going tablecloths had once been woven there or a girl's cheese sandwiches had warmed on the hob. In 1959, Mathewson's end hadn't been so long ago – 1930 was closer to 1959 than 1959 is to now – but such complete ruination, weeds replacing work, was one of the things that made my parents and so many others of that place and generation seem like survivors from a previous British age. Of course, nobody then had any idea of how much of this there was to come. Few of those involved emerge well from the story, but the charges against the SNP government in Edinburgh are the most serious. Accused of incompetence, evasion and the misuse of taxpayers’ money, the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and her colleagues have responded by talking about ‘learning lessons’, ‘saving jobs’ and ‘moving on’. Having renewed her demand for a second independence referendum, Sturgeon needs to demonstrate that her administration is more competent, transparent and responsive to local needs than the UK government. Scottish contempt for the Westminster political leadership reached new heights under Boris Johnson (and threatens to rise even further under Liz Truss), so this should be easy enough. But the SNP has held power in Scotland for fifteen years and has its own list of embarrassments, notably in the areas of public health, education and industrial policy. Compared to low life expectancy, the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and the near total foreign ownership of aquaculture and renewable technologies, the ferries are a minor failure. Only the thinly populated peninsulas and islands of western Scotland are directly affected; a resident population of at most seventy thousand. What makes the ferries so potent politically is that they concretely encapsulate government ineptitude. The Scottish government commissioned and funded the ships; the Scottish government now owns and manages the shipyard: the Scottish government will subsidise the ships when (though ‘if’ still can’t be ruled out) they are in operation. His last big commission was a 17,300-word piece for the London Review of Books on the Scottish government’s mishandling of the vitally needed refurbishment and resupply of ferries between the Scottish west coast and islands in the context of a history of shipbuilding on the Clyde. I f all had gone well​ with the building of the ships, none of this would have mattered much. But almost from the start, construction went badly. CMAL first reported problems to Transport Scotland’s steering group in December 2015. A year later, fourteen months into the contract, the government knew there was a risk of late delivery, a possibility that early in 2017 became ‘highly probable’.

Shipbuilding changed as it contracted. His special interest was outfitting – the pieces that were added to the fundamental structure of hull, superstructure and engines – which was done in-house when the yards were busy enough to employ their own carpenters, electricians and plumbers. But now the work was outsourced to subcontractors who ‘like to add on the extras’. When ships lost money for their builders, it tended to be in the outfitting. Other losses were more particular to Ferguson’s. ‘In the old days you could talk to each other about problems you’d come across and good ways to fix them. I liked learning from people and I liked imparting knowledge to others, and for them to at least consider that I might be right.’ The mood in Ferguson’s was more confrontational – the ‘new broom syndrome’, he said. ‘They built these fancy big new offices while the guys working outside made do with portacabins, which had no heating and where you couldn’t even boil a kettle.’ There was the lesson of the midships. ‘There were boxes everywhere. It’s easy to build boxes, but they got in the way, they often needed reworking later, and we needed to build other things first.’ I would welcome confirmation from you, on behalf of the CMAL board, that you are content with the assurances of the Scottish ministers provided above.He wrote for the Observer and Vanity Fair before joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. From there he moved to the editor’s chair at literary magazine Granta, where he remained until 2007. Soon after he moved to Oxford to do research for his DPhil under the formidable Helen Gardiner at Merton College: this, I suspect, is where much of his academic rigour came from. He went on to become a lecturer at Brasenose College in 1950, and senior research fellow in 1955. In 1961 he moved to Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Pembroke College and a university lecturer. He became a reader in 1973, and was appointed to a personal professorial chair in 1976. He retired in 1989. The cemetery opened in 1859, when the dead of Port Glasgow outgrew their old kirkyards and could no longer be dependably counted as Presbyterians. Generations of shipyard workers have been buried here, their lives often shortened by too many shifts in the cold and rain, or squalid housing, or too much drink, or a more 20th-century condition, mesothelioma, which is caused by exposure to asbestos and has a particular prevalence in old shipbuilding towns. But as the draughtman said, ‘it’s not just bodies that die, the skills and the memory of the skills die with them.’ Spencer never seems to have considered that aspect of the resurrection: that it would be useful as well as joyful, this rebirth of so much skill in a land that had lost it. It was pleasant to imagine the resurrected brushing off the earth and reaching for their tools, the just with the unjust, the welder with the fitter, the draughtsman and the joiner, the hauder-on and the putter-in.

Trying to find the birthplace of George Orwell – in Motihari, in Bihar state – he arrives with a headache, in part through re-reading 1984 on the bumpy car journey, observing (an offence against received intellectual opinion) that “as a novel it’s poor, as a prophecy it’s wrong, as an estimate of the human spirit it’s unforgivably bleak”.

For a timid undergraduate coming up to Pembroke College in 1969 to read English, the first meeting with Ian was something to be approached with trepidation. Already established with a high reputation from his early book Augustan Satire (1952), his volume in the Oxford History of English Literature covering the late Romatic period (1963), and his masterful Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967), he was known to be a rigorous and demanding teacher. He was indeed that, but he was a good and kindly one, too, and during my time at Pembroke, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate, he was supportive, helpful and wise, as well as exacting. While he believed in the highest academic standards, he had a genial smile, a warm Scottish brogue, an endearing nervous tic, and always offered a generous welcome. I hope this reassures you [McMillan] that, in line with the 2012 Ferries Plan, the Scottish government is continuing in its commitment to vessel replacement and providing potential work for the shipbuilding industry in Scotland.