Indeed, this weekend, the shipyard’s former owner Jim McColl, a former SNP adviser, said that, in a rush to bag a good news story for their conference, SNP ministers cut corners so they could award the contract to Ferguson Marine in the first place.

One of those corners happened to be the omission of any protection for the public purse. He told a newspaper “everything was about optics, the timing of the announcements, was for political gain”.

That’s an astonishing allegation because it suggests that the SNP were using big capital contracts, and taxpayers’ money, as a political fulcrum over which to maximise electoral gain.