Alf young on Thursday: There is nothing new in Scottish politicians straining every sinew to preserve Scottish companies and their headquarters here in Scotland.

There is nothing new in Scottish politicians straining every sinew to preserve Scottish companies and their headquarters here in Scotland. I was there, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when Ernest Saunders and his wife trudged round Edinburgh's New Town, supposedly house-hunting in the rain, for a photo-shoot during Guinness's hostile takeover bid for Scotland's largest whisky group, Distillers.

The devious Guinness CEO was out to prove that, if his offer prevailed, he would up sticks from his Buckinghamshire mansion and run his enlarged drinks empire from Scotland's capital city. Saunders knew the power of the tartan card. And how to trump it.

Only a few years earlier, Margaret Thatcher's Scottish ministers, Alex Fletcher to the fore, had openly campaigned against the Royal Bank falling into the hands of either Standard Chartered or the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. The Royal's board had wanted to merge with Standard. HSBC had gate-crashed the party. In the end the competition authorities, egged on by the government, ruled out both bids.

After Distillers had fallen to Guinness a member of the new executive team took me on a tour of the main Distillers headquarters. No, not in Edinburgh. It was already in London, near Buckingham Palace, in a house that had once belonged to the Queen Mother's family. Distillers' top brass lived in Surrey, not Scotland.

But Saunders never did come to live in Edinburgh. He did time in Ford Open Prison instead. And the drinks empire he helped shape, now known as Diageo, is still headquartered in London W1.

A fresh chapter in this protracted story is now being written. It features two storylines. What happens to the HBOS headquarters on Edinburgh's Mound, if it is swallowed by Lloyds TSB? And what fate awaits British Energy's current HQ and registered office in East Kilbride, now that its board has agreed a revised £12.5bn offer from state-owned French utility empire, EDF?

First Minister Alex Salmond, having assembled a consensual Scottish corporate and political chorus around him, is pushing Lloyds hard to retain a Scottish headquarters presence in Edinburgh. And yesterday his spokesman trumped that, by letting it be known EDF has already given Salmond assurances it will "maintain offices in East Kilbride", if the acquisition of British Energy goes through.

That latter commitment, made in June apparently, fair takes the breath away. The First Minister and his party think what British Energy does is the work of the devil. Nuclear power will have no place in Scotland's energy supply mix, if the SNP has its way. And just for good measure, the current administration at Holyrood recently rejected plans for a major wind farm on Lewis, promoted by British Energy and Amec.

So why would EDF, which is buying British Energy so that it can spearhead the building of a new generation of nuclear reactors in Britain, want to have anything to do with Scotland? It already has a large UK subsidiary, EDF Energy, which controls the wires supplying 20 million people with electricity from the Wash to Brighton, including London. It has 5.5 million electricity and gas customers on its books, owns two coal-fired stations, a gas-fired unit and a clutch of wind turbines in north-east England.

It plans four new reactors, each of 1600mw, at existing nuclear sites in the UK. But there is no mention of the two BE Scottish sites - at Hunterston and Torness - in its plans. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue, but on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday, British Energy's chairman, Sir Adrian Montague, seemed to be writing Scotland out of his script too. "The French nuclear system is much, much bigger than the English system and I think EDF will be committed to running the UK system on a completely stand-alone basis," he said. English system? How many times has he been to his Scottish headquarters?

EDF Energy already has a large corporate headquarters in London. If it acquires British Energy it will be more than twice as big as the next-largest generators in the UK, E.ON and Scottish & Southern. Its mix will be 58% nuclear even before it builds these four new reactors. Why would it want to retain a corporate headquarters in East Kilbride?

Do I detect another Ernest Saunders moment? That June assurance from EDF Energy's chief executive in the UK, Vincent de Rivaz, was, we are told, to maintain offices in East Kilbride. But what kind of offices?

I doubt the HBOS pile on the Mound in Edinburgh, despite displaying the group's brass plate, has been a real corporate HQ since the Bank of Scotland merged with the Halifax back in 2001. Apart from anything else, for a goodly chunk of that time, the historic pile was being gutted and refurbished. And a splendid job they did, too. However, I rather thought the CEO of Lloyds TSB, Eric Daniels, rather gave the game away when he said the Mound would continue to be the combined group's "Scottish residence".

There's a world of difference between a residence and a centre of significant decision making. So until Lloyds and EDF spell out, in detail, what they plan to do with the corporate bricks and mortar in Edinburgh and East Kilbride, I'll try to contain my expectations.