The 54-year-old, who died after a brief illness last week, was a member of that largely faceless army of men and women who work behind the political scenes, making sure things - to the extent they do - work.

Unsuccessful in his bid to win election as an SNP MSP for Dundee in the inaugural 1999 Holyrood election, Calum began working for some of his party’s successful candidates in the Scottish Parliament.

But - with all due respect to researchers - he was more than a researcher. Calum, a man who looked like a rugby player crossed with a boxer (the dog, not the sportsman), was a sharp political operator, often deployed by senior figures to fix problems. If a particular candidate was to be promoted or defeated in a candidate selection process, Calum was the sort of fellow who might be sent out to ensure the desired outcome was delivered.

Using charm rather than menace, Calum had a remarkable strike rate as a fixer. “They never,” says a friend, “saw him coming.”

Calum was unusual among the current crop of SNP back-roomers in that he had been around in the days before the party dominated our politics. He knew what failure was like.

When I got to know Calum, two decades ago, John Swinney was in the early days of a leadership that had started badly and would only get worse. The SNP was bitterly divided on the issue of how independence might be achieved. Swinney was undermined from day one by briefing from nationalist MSPs who opposed his gradualist approach.

For a relentlessly chaotic three years, Swinney’s leadership came under heavy attack from within the SNP. During this turbulence, Calum was a loyal and - until the forces of internal opposition became overwhelming - effective defender of the leader.

A small team - including Calum, some who’ve drifted from active politics, and some who’ve reached the top of the ladder - kept the SNP out of the hands of the fundamentalists whose proposals, which included wildcat referendums and a unilateral declaration of independence, would have driven the party further to the political fringes just when it was at its weakest.

Every person now working for the slick, successful SNP owes him something.

Back when Calum was firefighting for Swinney, the Scottish Parliament sat in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The spiralling cost of the still-unfinished Holyrood Building at the other end of the road dominated our politics.

In those days, it was routine - at close of play on Thursday - for a large number of MSPs and their staff to decant to a pub called Deacon Brodie’s. Party lines meant nothing and so it would be entirely unsurprising to enter the premises to find Calum drinking with then Tory leader David McLetchie. A Labour minister might be in the company, along with a pair of researchers who worked for opposing MSPs.

Looking at how tribal our politics seems to have become, it’s hard to imagine such a scene playing out today.

A friend of Calum’s points out that when the SNP MP Stewart McDonald recent described the Tory Tom Tugendhat, alongside whom he sits on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, as a friend, a number of supporters of independence used social media to question how this could be possible.

A friend of Calum’s says: “The idea that you can't be friends with people you oppose politically is getting more common but it’s crazy. Nobody was more committed to Scottish independence than Calum but there was also nobody more collegiate and willing to work across parties.”

During the final days of the 2014 independence referendum, I arranged to meet Calum at the Pear Tree pub in Edinburgh. We bumped into some Better Together campaigners and settled round a table in the beer garden.

He was sorry, said Calum, the sole nationalist among the campaigners gathered there, but he’d looked at the internal polling and Yes Scotland was going to win independence with two thirds of the vote. There was laughter from his rivals but Calum just shrugged and said surely they were seeing polling from their own side showing a similar result. Now they were unsettled. Did Calum really have access to information showing the UK was about to fall-apart?

Of course, he did not.

Times have changed and, like all nostalgists, I’m not sure how happy I am about that. It's difficult to see how the tone of our politics might be reset. The landscape is now peopled by powerful players who have never known anything but fierce tribalism.

Those politicians and activists - regardless of party or position on the constitutional question - miss out when they fail to engage with their opponents. I don’t mean merely engaging in debate or committee discussions, I mean away from the business of politics where they might develop some empathy for opponents and some understanding that the modern cliche that more unites than divides them is true.

Politics is - to some degree - a less boozy business than it once was and so I think it unlikely that we will see rival MSPs carousing together in an Edinburgh boozer any time soon.

Rather, it seems likely that enmity between opponents will deepen. A commitment by the SNP and the Scottish Greens to hold a second referendum will ensure our national debate remains focussed on the constitutional question and that will mean the continuation of tribal hostilities.

Our politics could do with more people like Calum Cashley, right now.

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Every person working for the slick, successful SNP owes Calum Cashley something - Euan McColm

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