ABSTRACT
Dewar was commemorated in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. The statue was donated by the Record, whose assaults on him were about as sustained and malevolent as those of Glasgow’s painstaking drunks on his bronze specs. Death, however, had absolved him from his most confrontational legacy. The Parliament was doomed by its Holyrood building to a long agony. A design by the imaginative Catalan architect Enrico Miralles convinced a rather ad hoc committee, then swept into production. Unfortunately, to an estimate of £40 millions for a basic building, a huge raft of additional work had to be added, chiefly to conserve the historic and decrepit Queensberry House, to accommodate the disabled, and to protect against bomb attack. The project rocketed over budget. In late 2001 it was £200 million; in 2003 over £400 million and rising. The country’s new guardians were getting their sums disastrously wrong.
