LET’S drop words like “fiasco” and “debacle”. The Ferguson ferry contract, how it was awarded and implications for victim communities now represent a full-scale scandal which cannot be wished away with glib platitudes that normally serve Ms Sturgeon well.

There are two factors which tip that balance. First is the explicit charge from Jim McColl that the contract was rushed through, regardless of risk, “for political purposes. Everything was about the optics, and timing the announcements for political gain."

To those of us who have followed the evolving scandal, that scarcely comes as a surprise. However, Mr McColl’s confirmation of a political operation from which he was a supposed beneficiary, reinforces the credibility of the charge.

If confirmed, it would surely represent an abuse of public office by Ms Sturgeon; knowingly putting at risk vast sums of public money for party political purposes. Even in Scotland, can that be brushed under the St Andrew’s House carpet? Are there no rules on propriety to which the First Minister is answerable?

The second factor flows from the view expressed by Mr McColl that it would now make sense to abandon the building of Hull 802, sell what there is of it and start again. By proceeding, he said, the overall costs of the two ferries will exceed £400 million.

Much the same point was made by Luke van Beek, the Scottish Government’s former shipbuilding adviser: “I assume the current estimate of cost is somewhere in the £350m to £400m bracket. The cost of completing them is likely to exceed the cost of starting again, particularly if they were to start again on a simpler design better suited to the ferry routes”.

These two opinions demonstrate the need for a moment of truth in this scandal. Until now, everything has been about politics. Now there must be realism because of the enormous implications for island communities if the trail of incompetence continues, driven once again by political imperatives.

McColl has been saying since 2019 that the project should be scrapped and started again with a more appropriate vessel design, because that would provide a cheaper and faster outcome. Three years and another couple of hundred million pounds later, he was clearly right – on all grounds other than political ones. So is he right again?

From the outset, everything about this scandal has been political. Alex Salmond’s decision to hand over the yard to Jim McColl in the run-up to the 2014 referendum was shamelessly political, announced in the Daily Record on a day when Salmond was the “guest editor”.

The decision to overrule advice from CMAL, the Scottish Government quango nominally responsible for ordering the vessels, was political without regard for consequences. The bogus “launch” of Hull 801 by Ms Sturgeon was a political farce. Indeed, the artificial funnel of self-publicity unconnected to any engine of reality might serve as a lasting metaphor for her career.

Each of these was tied to a political event – referendum, party conference, Scottish election. The problems of the Port Glasgow yard had been turned into a political opportunity for the SNP. The routine business of ordering vessels to serve island communities had become a political plaything.

A point was reached at which it became politically impossible for Ms Sturgeon and her transient colleagues to take a rational decision about what to do next. A repertory company of mediocrity – Mackay, Swinney, Brown, Yousaf – came and went with Ms Sturgeon the one constant as matters just kept getting worse.

Nationalising the yard was a populist option but again, as the Auditor General’s report makes clear, it was a botched job. The decision was taken “without a full and detailed understanding of the amount of work required to complete the vessels, the likely costs, or the significant operational challenges at the shipyard”.

How is this possible? How can government be allowed to operate at such a level of reckless incompetence? Yet again, the least of their considerations was whether this was really the best way forward in order that the ferries would be completed to serve island communities – the real victims of this scandal.

Since nationalisation, matters have gone from very bad to even worse. Again, the Auditor General’s report is revealing: “Major problems remain unresolved at the shipyard ... More than two years after the Scottish Government took over control, significant operational failures still need to be fully resolved and further remedial work on the vessels continues to be uncovered”.

On top of that, he makes clear the branches of the Scottish Government – Transport Scotland, CMAL and Ferguson Marine – continue to squabble like rats in a sack, with nobody in overall control and certainly no Minister willing or able to take responsibility. The pleadings to Holyrood of Kate Forbes and Jenny Gilruth were, frankly, pathetic.

So is it a “given” that the warnings from McColl and van Beek will again be ignored? Is there to be no serious, independent consideration of the option to start again in order to get an alternative to Hull 802 built quickly, wherever that might occur?

Who is Sturgeon listening to on this? Is it still the SNP’s army of spin doctors and opportunity organisers? Is it the civil servants in Transport Scotland’s ferries division whose credibility stands at somewhere below zero? Or is it an independent source who can take a realistic view of where the project now stands?

That question is of intense relevance to island communities, particularly but not exclusively those in Harris and Uist that were supposed to be served by Hull 802. How long is this going to go on, they desperately wonder?

Last week, Ms Forbes announced further delays of eight months so there is no prospect of either vessel entering service within five years of the original date. But neither is there any certainty that it will end there. Politics says press ahead. But what do shipbuilding knowledge and experience say?

For once, truth must be allowed to supersede politics and if that means further humiliation, then so be it. It is long past time for people and communities to come first. Just get the ferries built.

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