The attempt to create a modern Scottish Parliment building at Holyrood has been compared to the Sydney Opera House and the Millenium Dome but the reality is that it will almost certainly upstage both in terms of budget over-runs and the degradation of it's architectural vision. The cost of this building, now u250 million and rising, has come from the Scottish Exchequer. The author presents Holyrood as, at its heart, a system of denial. Between them, Tony Blair's government and a handful of Scottish civil servants were determined that the neoclassical parliment-in-waiting on Calton Hill was a shibboleth which had to be avoided at all costs. How did this happen and why? Who was to blame and who should bear the cost?"