Bruce Millan was that rarity among the ministerial class: a secretary of state (for Scotland) who could not be wrong-footed on the finer detail of a Scottish Office budget, down to the minutiae of the complex Barnett formula, which determines how much Scotland gets from the UK cake. Calm, understated, a politician of conviction, he was widely admired as someone whose grasp of detail put him on an equal footing with the most senior civil servants.
When I asked Donald Dewar, father of the Scottish parliament – and a later Scottish secretary – which politician he most admired as a a senior minister, he had no hesitation in replying: "Bruce Millan". When I accompanied Bruce from Brussels to Germany and France for a BBC Scotland radio documentary (by then he was a very effective EU regional affairs commissioner), it soon became clear to me why colleagues labelled him "quietly impressive". His grasp of EU detail confounded senior aides.