Danny Alexander, the reportedly beleaguered First Secretary to the Treasury, has understandably highlighted the fact that he was the first MP from a Highland constituency to make it to the UK Cabinet for ages. He suggested 50 years. It was, in fact, 40 (he joined the Cabinet in 2010).
Michael Noble was MP for Argyll and President of the Board of Trade for a brief period in 1970. A Tory grandee from a prominent Argyll landowning family on the shores of Loch Fyne, he had been Secretary of State for Scotland from 1962 to 1964.
But a very different MP for Argyll springs to mind at this time. It was 130 years ago this year that Donald Horne Macfarlane won the seat as one of the first Crofters' Party MPs to be elected.
He and four others (Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, Caithness and Wick Burghs) had been backed by the Highland Land League, which was agitating for relief for those struggling to survive the unforgiving economic stranglehold of the landlords.
Originally from Caithness, Macfarlane had been an MP for Carlow County in Ireland, as a member of the Charles Stewart Parnell's Home Rule Party.
He was a convert to Roman Catholicism and was the first MP of the faith to be elected to Westminster from a Scottish seat.
To win Argyll he had to overcome opposition from two powerful forces: the Presbyterian churches and the landlords. But he did so with an electorate dramatically expanded by the Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1884 and 1885, which saw the number of voters in Argyll rise from 3,299 in 1880 to 10,011 in 1885. He won a remarkable 48.6 per cent of the vote, soundly defeating the Liberal candidate in the process and more narrowly an Independent.
He lost the seat in 1886 but, in that year, Gladstone's Liberal government passed the first Crofters Act, delivering many of the reforms the Crofting MPs had sought. However he wasn't finished, being re-elected at the 1892 General Election as a Liberal/Crofters candidate and being knighted in 1894.
The Crofters Party had gradually merged with the Liberals, providing a cornerstone of a radical tradition of Liberalism in the Highlands. It survives to this day, most recently through the likes of the late Skye councillor Duncan Grant; MSP John Farquhar Munro in Kintail; the former Highland Council leader Dr Michael Foxley in Lochaber; and, yes, Charles Kennedy.
They helped paint the existing constituency map LibDem yellow from the Mull of Kintyre to Muckle Flugga. Although the Western Isles was beyond them, it was the party's greatest area of contiguous seats in the UK. All of the mainland Highland seats are now predicted to fall to the SNP.
Having tried to distance himself from the Coalition over the past five years, Mr Kennedy may yet defy the polls. But there are many Highland LibDems still trying to get their heads round just how their embrace of that radical tradition could have ended up helping sustain a Tory-led Government.
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