Now it’s nearly over, it feels weirdly personal. It started last May when I was in Weatherspoons – as I almost always am – and sat and watched a group of men in front of the pub going at Albert with picks and hammers before he was lifted into the air and taken away. A few months later, I met Albert again 400 miles away, still managing to be regal in the rather non-regal surroundings of a storage yard on an industrial estate. Now this week, I’m going to be there for his triumphant return on horseback to his plinth in Glasgow. We’ve bonded, him and me, but more importantly, it’s something the city can be proud of.

The statue of Albert, a matching one of Victoria, and nine other monuments were removed from George Square in May last year as part of the major renovation plans, leaving behind 11 ghostly plinths. You could tell who used to be on them by the names carved in stone, but even I, statue geek, struggled to recognise some of them: James Oswald, Thomas Campbell, John Moore. It’s one of the reasons some people said the statues shouldn’t come back. Who are these old white dudes from the history of slavery and war? What are they to us?

You may remember that the controversy reached its zenith in 2020 when the monument of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol was thrown in the river by Black Lives Matter demonstrators. The statue in Edinburgh of Henry Dundas also proved controversial because of his disputed role in slavery and its abolition, and several of the statues in George Square have also been identified as having links to the slave trade. Questions have been asked too about the cost of it all: the price for the restoration of the square and the surrounding streets is £20million (paid for by the Scottish........

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