One of the effects of Covid-19 is that it blots out other issues we would normally look at with greater care.

There ought to be greater concern regarding the remarkable amnesia which is engulfing members of the Scottish Government and civil servants as they give evidence to the committee investigating the Government’s flawed enquiry into Alex Salmond. Either there is a worrying decline in our leaders’ mental powers or – heaven forbid – some are being economical with the truth. Time will perhaps tell – but we should be paying more attention than we are.

Even Brexit now struggles to break through into our national consciousness in the way it once did – perhaps we are just bored with it.

The blinding effect of Covid-19 certainly means we do not focus enough on the Scottish Government’s record on the economy, where it has developed two bad habits.

The first of these is that when there seems to be a problem they pluck some poor soul from the private sector – Barclay, Higgins, Logan – to do a review and, when they come up with a report, say it’s brilliant, announce a blizzard of actions which don’t do much other than provide a few more jobs at some government agency and then let it quietly slide from view – having succeeded in the real object of making the Government look good.

The second bad habit is a series of woefully misjudged direct interventions in businesses. The sorry saga of Prestwick airport, not needed for civil aviation but now an unofficial US Air Force refuelling base. The sad tale of BiFab which cannot seem to win orders and whose time appears to be running out. The intervention which people understand least but which could turn out to be the most expensive – guaranteeing payments for power to the hydro-electric plant near Fort William. All of these have the potential to cost many tens of millions of pounds – and in the case of Prestwick and BiFab already have.

The one, however. which exemplifies most clearly the problem with the way the Scottish Government handles the Scottish economy is what can loosely be described as the Ferguson ferry screw up.

“Loosely” because what is wrong goes beyond just a contract going sour at a shipyard – and the Scottish Government is culpable at every step.

What our islands want is a ferry service which is reliable and frequent. Seems obvious and if you want proof look at the Gourock to Dunoon route – not an island service but a vital one nonetheless – where over many years the privately owned and unsubsidised Western Ferries put on increasingly frequent small ferries to such good effect that the rival CalMac subsidised service eventually threw in the towel.

What makes a ferry service unreliable is ageing equipment but it is also the wrong specification of equipment. You do not need a vessel which looks like it could cross the Atlantic to run a ferry service between Ayrshire and Arran. When bad weather stops the ferries, it is generally not because they might sink midway but because they can’t dock safely. When you are trying to dock in strong winds, a big ship with high sides is your enemy not your friend. What the Ardrossan to Brodick route needed was not one slow and over-large vessel but two new smaller ferries which could provide more and faster sailings.

The community on Arran knows the service it needs and the quirks of the harbour so why did nobody listen to them?

Just who was it in that closed loop of state control which is the Scottish Government, Caledonian Maritime Assets (which owns the ferries) and CalMac (which operates them) who did not listen? In a private company, the managers have to listen or else they go out of business but in a state-funded one they don’t. The ferry routes should have been privatised in a fair process long ago – not the nonsense which happened last time and saw CalMac awarded all the routes.

Who was it that decided the new ferries, instead of having efficient diesel engines with modern emissions control equipment, should instead have two sets of engines running on two totally different fuels? This decision added to complexity and cost for almost no environmental benefit.

Who was it in the Scottish Government that allowed the contract to build the ships to be awarded to Ferguson Marine without a proper tender process and decided to announce the price without that price actually having been agreed?

Why did the Scottish Government slyly lend Ferguson Marine money when it was getting into difficulty but pretended that money was for diversification?

The whole way in which our ferries are built, owned and operated is simply not fit for purpose and does our islands no good. An independent and wide-ranging enquiry into what went wrong is needed urgently.

Guy Stenhouse is a Scottish financial sector veteran who wrote formerly as Pinstripe