Four and a half years ago, on a characteristically gloomy November day on the River Clyde, Nicola Sturgeon was having a very special day out.
At Ferguson Marine shipyard in Port Glasgow on Scotland’s west coast, just a few miles down the road from Scotland’s largest city, the First Minister was guest of honour at the launch of its pride and joy, a new ferry named the Glen Sannox, built to serve Scotland’s island communities.
A special platform had been constructed for her and other VIPs. Scotland’s First Minister was given pride of place as the new ship slid down the slipway and into the black waters of the Clyde estuary.
That day in 2017 saw Ms Sturgeon and the SNP at the peak of their powers. Three years earlier, just before the Scottish independence referendum, the yard had been saved from collapse in a deal brokered by her predecessor Alex Salmond.
After succeeding him, Ms Sturgeon had awarded it the contract to build the Glen Sannox and another vessel.
In a part of Britain where the history of shipbuilding occupies a near-mythical grip on the popular imagination, it was a proud moment, and it was the First Minister who had made it happen.
The Glen Sannox launches on the Clyde on November 21, 2017, in a ceremony hosted by First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon
‘Ship launches are always emotional occasions but to have the return of commercial shipbuilding here on the Clyde at Ferguson’s is extra special,’ she gushed to waiting cameras. It seemed all was well.
But the reality was rather different. Attentive observers noticed that the windows on the bridge of the Glen Sannox weren’t real; they were fakes, painted on to make the ship appear finished for the occasion.
Nor was the hull in any way seaworthy. The ‘launch’ was for the cameras. At the end of the day, the cameras and Ms Sturgeon all went home.
And, staggeringly, 52 months on from the First Minister’s big day out, the Glen Sannox remains at the dock, unfinished.
Its sister vessel is even further behind.
Islanders, for whom these ferries are a lifeline connecting them to the mainland, are having to make do with an ageing fleet that regularly breaks down — only last week, the CalMacferry which serves the nearby Isle of Arran broke down.
The two new ferries are now more than four years overdue. On one level the debacle over the Glen Sannox is laughable — unlike Helen of Troy, Nicola of Edinburgh is the face who hasn’t launched so much as a dinghy.
But this scandal on the Clyde is now shining a spotlight on a much wider Scottish phenomenon: what might be called the ‘Sturgeonisation’ of government north of the border.
Like the fake windows of the Glen Sannox, it is a government that is often painted-on only. Governing isn’t the priority; its primary purpose is the break-up of the United Kingdom.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was in Port Glasgow in 2017 to name the liquefied natural gas passenger ferry MV Glen Sannox at the ceremony attended by owner of Ferguson Shipyard Jim McColl
And up till now, Scots have lapped up Ms Sturgeon’s pledge to ‘stand up for Scotland’ — while giving the boot to the unpopular Boris Johnson. Now the act is wearing thin.
The ferries fiasco has shown my fellow Scots that the SNP games and the endless politics are not cost-free. It leads to a government both incompetent and corrupt.
And as the full scale of the scandal emerges, the question lingering alongside the unloved, unfinished Glen Sannox is whether Ms Sturgeon’s struggle to break up Britain is also beginning to slide down the slipway, to sit marooned in a siding.
The story of the ship that didn’t sail has dominated the home news agenda in Scotland over the past few weeks. It began in late March with a devastating report by the country’s independent spending watchdog, Audit Scotland.
Right from the off, the report concluded, the project had been beset by ‘a lack of transparent decision-making, a lack of project oversight and no clear understanding of what significant sums of public money have achieved’.
And the detail of the report revealed something highly irregular. In 2015, the Ferguson yard told transport chiefs it couldn’t provide a refund guarantee if things went wrong — normally a standard element in any contract. Scotland’s public ferry agency consequently warned the SNP the project was too risky.
Yet while the alarm lights were flashing, we have now learned that Ms Sturgeon’s government insisted the plans — and the photo-ops — carry on. Audit Scotland has drily concluded there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to explain why. And over recent weeks, the plot has only thickened.
Pursued for an answer, Ministers have shrugged — either the documentation has gone missing or never existed in the first place.
This, commented Ms Sturgeon last week, was ‘regrettable’. The stench of a cover-up is everywhere.
Back at the yard, there are fears the two ships will remain stuck in the dock for some more months, possibly years, to come.
Which is also where, this spring, we find the SNP. Ever since they rescued the yard in the run-up to the referendum, both Alex Salmond and then Nicola Sturgeon took every opportunity to enjoy their apparent success down on the Clyde.
Even when the SNP was forced to nationalise it as the project turned bad, the rescue was sold as a triumph. Here was a perfect opportunity to show off the SNP’s mantra that they, and they alone, ‘stand up for Scotland’.
Indeed, in one cringingly embarrassing promotional video, Ms Sturgeon boasted of just this in front of the ship itself.
Hundreds of well-wishers turned out to watch the Glen Sannox launch on the Clyde, expecting the vessel to make many voyages to the islands and back
But the Audit Scotland report and the growing scandal around secret decisions and conveniently misplaced documents, has shown Scotland the price tag attached to this hubris.
The original cost of £97 million could potentially now hit more than £400million. The profligacy has been summed up by revelations over the hiring of a government appointed ‘turnaround’ director who came in as things went dowhill.
He was paid an eye-watering £3,000 a day, and when he quit last year, as
