Angus MacLeod, Scottish Editor of The Times and distinguished broadcaster

It is very sad, at the end of a remarkable political season, to mark the death of Angus MacLeod.

The editor of The Times in Scotland was one of the country's most respected journalists.

Like every other reporter Angus MacLeod could be reduced to a name  above a newspaper article. But for colleagues and politicians who admired his inquiring mind he was a character much bigger than any by line.

After decades in print he still greeted every story with huge enthusiasm, firing up others around him as he cut through to the heart of what mattered.

He had a reputation as an old school print journalist, but was cuter than all the young reporters he mentored and took to every media platform. His last tweet was in defence of one of his reporters.

And that voice. Many's the Radio Scotland listener would not rise from their bed until his eloquent Saturday morning newspaper review was complete.

That voice turned newsprint into verse, no mean achievement even with his lilting Hebridean accent. 

  

Angus Macleod's every syllable resonated of a home he left years ago.

People think he was the sound of Stornoway but in fact his was a very specific Isle of Lewis brogue. 

Gaelic was on his tongue though not his lips. He had the pleasant grout of Plasterfield, a pre-fab housing estate where the edge of the English-speaking town met the sound of the Gaelic hinterland and mixed. 

Like all village sounds in Scotland that accent is being smoothed away, it is all but gone.

  

Angus was a rare pebble on the shoreline, and his voice and his influence on Scottish journalists will echo for a long time to come.