MAYBE the events of the last fortnight in Scottish politics may seem like they have proven Harold Wilson’s adage that “a week is a long time in politics” true, maybe not.

One thing is for certain, if a week is a long time in politics, 25 years seems like an eternity.

Around a quarter of a century ago, I was finding my feet as a postie in Govan. Like all the newbies before me, I spent the first few months on walks that the old hands avoided; four-storey tenements, the mankiest closes, or regularly deluged with bulk mailings.

At this time, I was put on the Harhill walk for a while. In my innocence, I thought this would be a great couple of weeks. I was covering a relatively senior comrade’s holiday, and thought to myself that the duty couldn’t be all that bad if he’s signed for it.

Another bonus was that I thought I knew it — it was just along the road from where I lived. All good.

The golden rule when doing a new delivery is get the sorting right, and follow the letters — it didn’t work.

A few hundred yards from my flat, I managed to get completely lost as the 1970s layout of the greying “white scheme” beat me.

I wandered for what felt like hours, asking for directions to doors from folk who lived there and didn’t know either, entering the wrong closes, or the same ones twice, and even finding two front doors with the same number next door to one another but on different streets.

Despite knowing the few hundred yards home, and the way back to the delivery office, I was nonetheless lost.

I recommend getting lost from time to time, it focuses attention and you notice things that would otherwise pass you by.

That day, looking upwards for a number or a sign, in what I now know is Harmony Place, I saw a shining silver plaque among the roughcast which read: “This, the one millionth post-war house / to be built in Scotland,/ was opened by / the Rt. Hon. Bruce Millan. M.P. / Sectretary of State for Scotland / on 13th February 1978.”

Years in the post and canvassing meant I didn’t get lost when I returned this week to get a photograph of it for a comrade with deep interest in housing, but it did get me thinking.

In less than 33 years, in a country of around five million people, 1,000,000 homes had been built, many of which were in public ownership.

While new homes do need to be built, the challenge today is overwhelmingly in overcoming the home-hoarding instincts of the parasitical landlords who scooped up so many of those homes built in a spirit of common ambition, endeavour and ownership.

Last week the play sketching out the life and death of Aneurin Bevan — Nye — was beamed to a cinema in Glasgow, and I was coaxed along.

A running gag in the production is Atlee throwing in “and housing” every time Nye gets lost dreaming of building our precious National Health Service, and very good it is too.

His Ministry of Housing brief saw levels of public investment in homes that is scarcely imaginable today, an achievement largely overlooked because most of that spending didn’t deliver homes until the Tories had returned to power, and the small matter of him building Britain’s only socialist public institution still standing after decades of attacks.

The play was quite something, a fever-dream of argument and banter, from the Tredegar library to its council, and from the bars of Parliament to offices of the British Medical Association, and all the time in hospital, the clock running down.

Fear runs right through the play, running from it, confronting it, defeating it. The great man lost in his pyjamas, the great orator beaten for his stammer at school but defended by his schoolmates, the great trade unionist who broke the BMA, and the great humanist who built the NHS but was unable to countenance his dying father’s black lung; the idealist who compromised.

Those of us who have suffered the endless committees and lobbying that come with elected office or the comradeship alternating with backbiting, back-stabbing and chicanery in the Labour Party would recognise many of the quandaries he wrestles with during the play, and with some laughter it did hammer home that in many ways not much has changed — Herbert Morrison haunts Nye just as his grandson Lord Mandelson haunts the left today.

Throughout the play, Nye is lost in the darkness, haunted from flashback to flashback, from defeat to victory, but — in the most moving part of a moving play — in the end realises his time is up.

He tries to escape, he fights the dying of the light with all he has and cries “there’s more to do,” but in the end he accepts it, knowing what he is leaving us behind.

Hauntings or otherwise, Bevan did build something that has stood the test of time. Very little else has, if we are honest.

The houses built under his programmes remain among the best built by the British state, often outliving those built in subsequent decades. Likewise the NHS survives, bruised, battered and still under attack, to be sure, but  nonetheless it stands as an example of what is possible.

In the decades since, what has truly been created by the state that we can look upon with any sense of pride, of solidarity? Very little indeed. While the Thatcher years were characterised by the “selling the family silver,” as Harold Macmillan memorably put it, the Blair years were all style and no substance, throwing money around and doing some good good, but leaving precious few monuments — other than war memorials — when the circus moved on.

A few of those precious monuments were the devolved legislatures. 

As I wandered around Harhill all those years ago, the new Scottish Parliament was finding its feet. It duly found them, and used them to spend the intervening 25 years kicking the hell out of local government and drawing power towards itself, but you’ve heard that tune before.

The old guard were wheeled out this week to comment on the passing of that milestone, not least Lord Wallace, Liberal deputy first minister in the Labour- Liberal coalition that ruled until SNP won power in 2007. 

His eight years as deputy leader and decades in public office conferred on him a wisdom that led him to conclude the big change needed a quarter-of-a-century on was more MSPs — “I think 129 needs to be looked at again,” he said.

Meanwhile this week, suddenly, nothing happened, when we got a new first minister as John Swinney returned to the SNP leadership after a 20-year break, during which time he spent 16 years  in government, pulling off the amazing feat of slashing public services as finance minister and allowing working-class kids to have their exam results downgraded as education minister.

It was just a play, but old Nye-the-builder haunted by building something beautiful and his own cries of “there’s more to do,” made me wonder what today’s crop are haunted by.

I can only fantasise at the actions I hope haunt Tony Blair as he rambles around his mansion of an evening, and maybe Lord Wallace wakes up in a cold sweat wishing he fought a little harder for more MSPs; but having spent nearly three times longer in government than Bevan and created nothing, what exactly is out there in the darkness of Bute House for a pyjama-clad John Swinney?

They aren’t haunted. 

You can’t be haunted by tweaks, by managing politics, people, and above all expectations. To be haunted requires imagination, regret, to admit as the “grown-ups in the room” that they are learning and lost.

They cannot get lost, sadly. 

That’s a shame, they’d learn a lot.