MICHAEL Moore may be taking a leading role in arguing the unionist position in the current debate over Scotland's future.

But that's not what he's most keen to talk about when we meet just days before he was laid low with the chicken pox he caught from his two-year-old.

Today he is taking the high road, stressing areas of agreement and co-operation with the Scottish Government, reeling off co-operation on economic areas such as youth unemployment, rural post offices,and superfast broadband.

As "Scotland's man in the Cabinet and the Cabinet's man in Scotland", he describes himself as a kind of facilitator for interventions by colleagues like Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and Consumer Affairs Minister Ed Davey.

"A major part of my role is to make sure I bring the relevant departments who have a stake in Scotland's economy into close contact with the people who need to be supported," he says.

It is an indication that, although many in the business community may see it as a distraction from the daily slog of surviving in tough times, constitutional combat may have an upside for Scotland's companies.

How? To support their assertion that their preferred settlement is better for growth, Scotland's two governments need to show as well as tell. In 10 years, neither Holyrood nor Westminster has provided an effective answer to slow growth in Scotland, though not for want of spending or speechifying.

Now referendum showtime is here, both the Coalition and the SNP governments need interventions that demonstrably boost Scotland's national wealth.

The Secretary of State for Scotland is keen to stress that his role is as much about leveraging membership of a recovering UK to benefit Scottish business, as it is about constitutional issues.

"My fundamental starting point is that we have to create wealth before we can get the taxes that will pay for the high-quality public services we want. I entirely understand what makes business tick and [economic growth] has remained something I have focused on since day one."

Friends of the Liberal Democrat MP for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, say that he is "probably as surprised as anyone to have ended up as Secretary of State for Scotland", pitching him into a role of unprecedented complexity on constitution and coalition.

However, the 46-year-old former accountant seems unfazed. In his office at the Scotland Office in Edinburgh (known to wags as "The British Embassy), his pitch is that steady, practical remedies to the UK's economic despond will count for more than promises of transformation, and presentational fireworks. A mainstream LibDem who saw off a strong Tory challenge to David Steel's old seat, Moore looks hard to unsettle.

His big idea is about "breaking down barriers" to effectiveness that result from the split in devolved and reserved areas that merely complicate the picture and confuse the end user, for example between Jobcentre Plus and Skills Development Scotland where, he discovered at a summit last year, "nobody quite understood who did what, where", and which he claims to have sorted.

"Where we need to," he says, he and the Scottish ministers have good relations. Among the items on his agenda are broadband, high-speed rail, oil and gas taxation, the defence sector, access to finance, the fossil-fuel levy, youth unemployment, enterprise zones, business taxation and export certification; time and energy for which is at risk of being curtailed by higher-profile constitutional questions.

To air them, he has rounded up a high-calibre Scottish Business Board of industry leaders to inform him about the priorities of crucial sectors, but Moore already knows more about what makes Scotland's SMEs tick than most politicians. He got into their innards during 10 years working in the Edinburgh office of accountant Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers).

"I trained as a CA and got a fantastic general business education from the range of Coopers & Lybrand clients, not just in Scotland but across the UK, from big companies like Austin Reed, to small family-managed, family-owned businesses in Fife or to some of the big conglomerates who had Scottish roots," he says. "I saw for myself how businesses had to cope with what was already a globalised economy.

"When I became an MP my interest in business continued. I have always made a point of getting in touch with local businesses and taking up issues that might come to pass."

One Borders business owner attests that Moore is an effective advocate: "Michael is around a lot, and is very conspicuous in the constituency, not just because he's so tall [6ft 3]. This is partly why the Tories failed to unseat him. He's very solid, very good – not on the loony Liberal wing."

Moore has to persuade Scots that his Government is on a trajectory that will help business to flourish in future.

'Challenging as the deficit reduction plan is, you can see the way the ratings agencies have treated us in the past two years, we have been given the credit for taking difficult decisions and being prepared to deliver them. Even the [Labour] opposition are now accepting that credibility comes with tough choices. Perhaps, there will be more consensus around that kind of issue," he continues.

"It's not just enough to take the difficult choices, it's also about creating the economic conditions that will encourage businesses to invest, and draw others to invest in this country and support people through what are rather challenging times.

"So, whether it's through the tax system with the reduction in corporation tax, the national insurance proposals, or helping individuals through the Work Programme to get the support they need to find work, and also make sure that work is paying to help people who in the past might have had a disincentive to start working or to increase the hours they are working - We are bringing in some pretty major reforms in all these areas."

Moore seems impatient with the progress of efforts to boost exports and has been careful to link the Scotland Office with trade missions, notably Brazil, which has now overtaken the UK as the world's sixth-largest economy, and yet rarely features on the horizon of Scottish exporters.

"When I was in Brazil in November I was the 12th ministerial visit in 18 months. That demonstrates a scale of engagement that has been missing in the past.

"When you look at Scotland's performance in Brazil, it's about £118m of exports, it doesn't even make our top 20 export destinations, although its the sixth-biggest economy in the world. The rebalancing of the economy means putting much more effort into supporting manufacturing and other sectors of the economy, and geographically trying to spread [the benefits of] that around the UK."

When the constitutional wrestling gets ugly, there is hope that Scotland's two governments will use their shared responsibility for business and the economy as the arena of ostentatious compromise and co-operation, or even constructive competition in alleviating the constraints that business faces on all sides, from infrastructure to regulation to tax proliferation. "I don't think people in Scotland would forgive either of us if we weren't working together," Moore says.