Holyrood inquiry QC lashes out at MSPs and civil servants

Mr Campbell lambasted those who ran the project, from the civil servants to the politicians, accusing them all of failing to tackle any of the problems that came to plague the building.

"I contend there were not sufficiently well-qualified people in that team to make the slightest difference," he said.

The leading advocate, who took the central role in the eight-month-long inquiry, has never spoken out to express his views on the Holyrood project - until now.

He had decided to stay in the background, allowing Lord Fraser of Carmyllie to produce his report and his findings without any interference. But Mr Campbell has obviously decided that enough time had passed since the publication of Lord Fraser’s report in September and that he could now make his own views known.

Accepting an invitation from the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland to address a conference on lessons from the Fraser Inquiry, Mr Campbell used the opportunity to explain what he felt had gone wrong and why.

He was frank about whether the Fraser Report had changed anything - "probably not," he said.

Mr Campbell was particularly scathing of the MSPs on the Holyrood Progress Group, which was set up four years ago to get the troubled project under control.

He said: "Professional teams were all treated as menials by the Holyrood Progress Group. They were kept waiting, they were treated as office boys."

And he added: "I do not believe the Holyrood Progress Group assisted the matter at all. They certainly didn’t accelerate the building programme or articulate the delivery of architectural designs."

The MSPs responsible were Labour’s John Home Robertson and Lewis Macdonald, the SNP’s Linda Fabiani and the Liberal Democrat Jamie Stone - all of whom served on the progress group but without doing anything of any value, according to Mr Campbell.

Putting the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body in charge of the project in 1999 was also a disaster, according to Mr Campbell, because the MSPs on it had so much else to attend to.

"It’s mince," he said. "It is absolutely impossible to see how they could have done it even if they had nothing else to do because they had no skills."

Mr Campbell was equally dismissive of the civil servants who tried to run the project, arguing that they had done nothing to curb the rising costs and time overruns.

He berated senior civil servants for appointing a "librarian" - Barbara Doig - with no relevant experience, to head the building work. "There is no doubt that the rot began to set in with the appointment of somebody who was entirely dependent on others for professional advice," he said.

He added that he could not understand why Enric Miralles had been given the main architectural contract when he had not even come close to selection after the first interview.

Although he declined to single out any of these civil servants by name, it was clear Mr Campbell was blaming Sir Muir Russell, the Permanent Secretary at the Scottish Office who was ultimately responsible for the decision to appoint Mrs Doig to a key role in the project but, by implication, he was also critical of John Gibbons, the Scottish Office’s chief architect and leading civil servants Robert Gordon and Paul Grice.

He said he was aware that changes had been made to Scottish Executive building procurement regulations following the Fraser Report but he said he hoped the eventual repercussions would be more wide-ranging than that.

The two major changes which Mr Campbell said could have made a difference would have been the creation of a minister with specific responsibility for the building - "a political champion", as he described it - and the appointment of a "construction hard man" to take the project through to conclusion, rather than the committees of politicians and civil servants.