Joking apart, the IMF visitation of 1976 is still reliably posted as the ultimate failure of a Labour government. In fact, the IMF-precipitating episode of 1976 was sparked by someone at the Treasury, never identified, selling pounds for dollars in the wake of the cuts imposed and recovery achieved in 1975 by the chancellor, Denis Healey. Derek Mitchell, then permanent secretary at the Treasury, would later tell me that the entire 1976 episode, IMF and all, had been ‘strictly a headline crisis’. Indeed as the crisis broke, the scarcely pinko Investors Chronicle had asked: ‘why now, when the real crisis was last year?’ Stanley Spencer lived on the edge of Clune Park in 1944; one of its tenements appears in a picture he painted from his window. He was in Port Glasgow as an official war artist, commissioned to depict Clyde shipbuilding’s war effort, producing a memorable series of long, narrow canvasses that showed the workers at Lithgow’s yard lit by the flames of their furnaces and oxyacetylene torches and cramped awkwardly – almost like miners in a seam – as they toiled to make a ship from the confusion of its parts. In these pictures, building a ship is a religious act. When he began to tire of shipbuilding (and shipbuilding of him – James Lithgow had imagined more conventional pictures of his products), Spencer found Christ in the municipal cemetery near his lodgings. The writer and former Observer foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson said: “We have lost one of our great journalists, a writer of enchanting imagination and at the same time a reporter rigidly scrupulous in his insistence on fact.

He was born in Lancashire, but his Scottish parents returned to North Queensferry when he was seven. He started work as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965. 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. He started as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965, before moving to London in 1970 to join the Sunday Times and then joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. He had been a Guardian columnist for the past 15 years.N one​ of this did much good in the long term. By 2019, relations between the two had broken down, and construction work had come to a near standstill. In early summer that year, CMAL reported to the steering group at Transport Scotland that both ships were years away from delivery; that no more than six people were working on vessel 801 and no more than two people on vessel 802 at any one time. 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. 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. Janet Malcolm. "The Journalist and the Murderer | What's New". Granta Books . Retrieved 20 March 2016. Context was supremely important to Ian's understanding of a literary work or of a writer. He wanted to know the political and social currents of the time, the impact that they had, and the influence they brought to bear on a particular work. From his earliest literary writings on, he believed passionately in seeing the work as a whole, in its tradition and in its contemporary context; only then could its true meaning and value be appreciated.

He revelled in intelligent conversation, never conducted without a twinkle in the eye. And he relished his connection, long after his retirement, with the academic excellence and attachment to great and enduring works of literature that Cambridge English represented for him. I owe him a lot, and all the other students I know, who learned and studied with him over the years, would say exactly the same. 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”. Oliver Luft (28 November 2008). "Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 March 2016. Even so, CMAL had to intervene further to make sure Ferguson’s could be justified as the winning bidder. The scoring system allocated points on two scales, quality and price, and original designs submitted by Ferguson’s measured poorly on the second – they were the most expensive – with no compensating high score on the first. Conversations between CMAL and Ferguson’s produced a series of adjustments that gave the shipyard 36.5 points out of 50 for cost and 38 out of 50 for quality. It was still the most expensive, but a ten-point advantage for quality made it the overall winner – the ‘preferred bidder’. But that came later. In 2015, the news was good. Travelling by train through Port Glasgow, I would look out at its familiar landmarks: the abandoned tenements, the long-closed ropeworks where my cousin Margaret used to work, the near derelict hotel where in 1964 I danced at her wedding. Among these dim memorials, how could a reinvigorated shipyard with an ambitious industrialist at its helm be anything other than cheering?

This most refined of journalists did not go to university, but followed a hallowed apprenticeship route to Fleet Street. Born in Farnworth, now in Greater Manchester, at seven he moved with his mother, father and elder brother, Harry, to North Queensferry, on the coast of Fife: his father, Henry, was fourth engineer on a British India Line cargo ship and later worked as a fitter in various companies: his mother, Isa (nee Gillespie), was born in Kirkcaldy to the daughter of a Royal Scot wounded in the first world war, and was a quality inspector in linen mills before marriage.

O n​ a wet and windy Saturday in October a few regulars of the Ian Allan Book and Model Shop gathered inside the premises for the last time. The shop – on Lower Marsh, behind Waterloo Station – would soon be a memory, like many things to do with the railway hobby. One or two customers chatted to the soon to be redundant staff. Others encouraged a yappy terrier to chase a tennis ball across the stretches of empty carpet where the display cases used to be. Most of us did as we had always done and leafed through books and put them down again: men who, perhaps like those in the fetish shop across the street, had deep and almost unreachable reasons for their interests. McNeill: We became aware that FMEL could not provide a Clyde Blowers Capital guarantee on 21 August 2015. We were not aware until about 25 September that it was also having problems producing a guarantee from a bank or an insurance company, and it gave its final position in relation to that on 7 October, by which time it was already the preferred bidder and we had stood down the other bidders.

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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.

I was surprised and disappointed to find Ian injecting the fallacy of relative privation into his account of the SNP government's double dealing over the 'ghost ferries' of Port Glasgow. " 'It happens all the time,' people say." Yes, indeed. And much worse things are happening all over, all the time. In fact, why worry about anything Sturgeon's lot get up to when Putin's lot may be working up to a nuclear strike? In McColl’s version of events, the most spectacular consequence of CMAL’s hurry was the premature launch of hull 801. The plan had been to build the two sister ships – identical twins, as he understood it – simultaneously, side by side on the slipways. Since the working space around the slipways was cramped, partly thanks to FMEL’s new offices and fabrication shed, the yard planned to start building the ships from the stern, the end nearest the water, rather than from midships, which is more usual. This would enable materials to be supplied from the bow end rather than the narrow space at the sides.

It was obvious by the late 1950s that competition from shipyards abroad using more modern methods would lead to the end of British yards. As they drifted towards unproductivity, there was a rare burst of resistance when in 1960 we apprentices undertook a successful six-week strike to gain day-release so that we could attend technical college. The government of the time had been content to leave industrial training to employers, but in 1963 a bill was passed to create industrial training boards funded by a levy on employers in all sectors. Costs could be recouped by employers when training was provided. In 1971, the British Oxygen Company funded my studies, including an annual week’s study leave, from the levy. Formed in 1886, BOC is one of Britain’s oldest industrial companies; it is now owned by the German Linde Group. He was political but never polemical, his column-writing notable more for its accumulation of telling detail than the force of his opinions. He never forgot that he was first and foremost a reporter, and he wrote in a way that accorded the reader respect and invariably gave pleasure. He once observed that “good reporters matter in the media above all else, because without them we can never get near to confidently knowing the truth of an event.”