“IT was good to see Lord Hailsham in Glasgow yesterday. We don’t often get the chance to go stark, staring bonkers over a visiting Tory dignitary. So wrote Colm Brogan in Floater, this paper’s General Election diary, in September 1974. Predictably, the former Lord Chancellor had weighed in on the endless devolution debate and, just as predictably, rejected it, declaring that separation would be disastrous for Scotland, England and Wales.

He said that all the countries of Britain seemed to have lost the visions that had made them a great, forward-looking people. They were now torn by divisions.

We could not, he added, turn our backs of 250 years of successful co-operation.

Hailsham, who is pictured feeding the pigeons in George Square during his flying visit, said that the breaking-up of the UK would render the British people poor, inefficient, parochial, and despised in the world.

“I believe if we had come to terms with devolution at the time of the Gladstone Home Rule bill we would never have seen the partition of what was then the UK, and we would never have had the split in the British Isles which I deplore but must accept.”

Hailsham, however, could seemingly turn his back on less than 100 years of history, said Brogan.

“For yesterday he was insisting that had we only listened to Gladstone and the good sense of that Prime Minister’s views on devolution and home rule, we would now have none of this silly nationalist nonsense.

"A pity that Gladstone was about the most famous Liberal ever (leaving aside the dog-food salesman [Sir Clement Freud].

"A pity that it was Gladstone who began the Liberal Party tradition of federalism, which the present lot are so painfully reminding us has been central to party policy since Asquith first appeared.

"Otherwise, quite a good performance, Lord Hailsham,” Brogan concluded.

Tomorrow: Hailsham at Glasgow University in 1960