A few days after the devastating second fire ripped through Mackintosh’s art school the chair of governors, Muriel Gray, stood in front of the remains and declared: “My will is ironclad that it will survive.”

She was speaking for most of Glasgow, as well as many of the building’s fans around the world, when she insisted it should be rebuilt, concluding on the verge of tears: “It’s going to come back. It’s just going to take us some more time.”

You would need a heart of sandstone not to be moved by the plight of the Mac, and indeed that of Page/Park which was nearing the end of its painstaking reconstruction, begun after the 2014 fire.

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