Dream that failed to bring in the crowds

By the time Tory peer Lord Sempill dreamt up the concept for The Gathering in February 2007, plans were well advanced for the first Year of Homecoming, a huge campaign to persuade people around the globe to visit Scotland in 2008 during the 250th anniversary celebrations of the birth of Robert Burns.

Lord Sempill's idea of a two-day clan gathering in Holyrood Park, sandwiched around a parade on the Royal Mile and a spectacular pageant at Edinburgh Castle, secured 490,000 in public money as it became enshrined as the centrepiece of Homecoming programme. But the organisers started to run into trouble in the wake of the global financial crash in the autumn of 2008, when sales of tickets for the event overseas ground to a halt.

Prices had to be slashed to avoid the prospect of hundreds of empty seats at the castle esplanade. The initial response to the event had been overwhelmingly positive, with official analysis claiming it had generated more than 10 million. But behind the scenes it was clear that Lord Sempill and his team had got their sums badly wrong as they were struggling to settle debts.

What First Minister Alex Salmond and then-culture minister Mike Russell also knew in the wake of the event was that it had only gone ahead after they had sanctioned a secret loan of 180,000.

Mindful of the bad publicity which the collapse of Lord Sempill's company would have attracted, Mr Salmond urged the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo to take on its assets and liabilities, but was swiftly rebuffed. He won a more sympathetic ear after turning to Steve Cardownie, deputy council leader in Edinburgh, and his officials. The rest is an unseemly episode in the history of the local authority.

A hastily-agreed deal to secure the future of further "Gathering" events, by passing responsibility for them onto the council's new marketing firm, started to unravel within days.

When the council finally pulled the plug the following January, more than 100 creditors were left staring into a black hole.