Those were the days ‘An unassuming but significant figure’ in politics

“MILLAN steps out from the shadow of Ross” was the headline in this newspaper on April 9, 1976, as Jim Callaghan revealed his new Cabinet, appointing Bruce Millan as Willie Ross’s successor as Scottish Secretary of State.

Millan, the Dundee-born MP for Glasgow Craigton, had been Ross’s heir apparent since 1973, when he was made Labour’s Scottish Affairs spokesman.

The party had won power the following year, and Millan, as Minister of State at the Scottish Office, went on to play a major role in increasing the office’s role at the expense of the Department of Industry, to the displeasure of industry secretary Tony Benn.

Millan was behind Scottish devolution, we observed in 1976, but he believed that the essential thing was to get everything right when it came to the transferring and retaining of powers.

Millan is seen (above) in April 1977, en route to the STUC conference at Rothesay, and

(main image) with John Smith at a press conference during the 1983 general election. When he died, aged 85, in 2013, the Herald obituary opened: “Bruce Millan ... was an unassuming but significant figure in Scottish, UK and European politics for almost three decades. In the late 1970s he was a dry but efficient Scottish Secretary, and in the late 1980s a low- profile but highly competent European Commissioner”.

The Scottish Development Agency had been his brainchild as a junior minister, and he used it to regenerate Scotland’s inner cities. Together with the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Joel Barnett, he had devised the Barnett Formula. He had been

“in his element” as Commissioner for Regional Policy and Cohesion, a post he held until 1995; “fittingly, that brief required direct – and economically beneficial – dealings with Scotland, most notably in the Highlands and Islands”.