Out of the picture

According to its former director, James Holloway, it would be “nonsense” to include a portrait of Tony Benn in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (your report, 16 May). Really?

Tony Benn has a good claim. Besides being, as energy secretary, a major figure in North Sea oil in the 1970s, he is half-Scots.

His mother, Margaret Eadie Holmes, was born in Paisley to the literary journalist, later MP, David Holmes and the daughter of the burgh’s provost. Her memoir, My Exit Visa (1992), captures the feisty radicalism of west coast Scotland before the First World War, handed on to her son.

Would she have endorsed the Holloway rebuild completely? In the procession of the Scots great and good, above the entry hall, there’s still no woman after Mary, Queen of Scots. And what has happened to the grand statue of Thomas Carlyle, whose philosophy of the heroic started the whole project?

Has that “flash of lightning in a grocer’s shop” been stuck in the cellar to make way for sportsfolk and celebs?

Christopher Harvie

High Cross Avenue

Melrose