You’ve been in this situation many times. An influential leader in business or politics or academia sits across from you in their elegant – but minimalist – office in a chrome and glass four-storey edifice in Glasgow or Edinburgh and begins to tell you about their humble upbringing in an edgy, working class neighbourhood.

Today, Dr Marie Macklin is telling me about her upbringing on Kilmarnock’s Onthank housing scheme. And yes, her business headquarters are indeed somewhat deluxe and the soft furnishings are tidy and tickety-boo. Here’s the thing though: you can see the very same Onthank estate out of her office window and the knobbly sweep of Killie beyond.

Dr Macklin has become one of Scotland’s most important business leaders (and has a wee CBE bearing witness to the fact). And yet, there’s a lingering sense that we should all have heard more about her. She should certainly have a permanent place on the Scottish Government’s prestigious Advisory Council for Economic Transformation. Perhaps they consider Dr Macklin to be a little too independently-minded.

Yes, she led the campaign to transform the sprawling former Johnnie Walker site in Kilmarnock into this grand Halo building, from where her remarkably successful urban regeneration and urban renewal projects have been launched. And yes, she persuaded the American astronaut Dr Kathleen Rubins to take a piece of specially-designed Halo tartan on a jaunt to the International Space Station. And certainly, she’s in constant demand to join boards, pick up awards and lecture international delegates about what can be achieved in breathing life into places that governments consider beyond repair.

Dr Macklin, you see, is a former member of the Conservatives and (worse in this SNP’s eyes) an admirer and former business confidante of Alex Salmond who persuaded her of what independence could achieve for Scotland. Nor has she been slow to offer business advice to the Scottish and UK governments over their joint failure to secure a future for the Grangemouth refinery.

“If I was sitting in front of John Swinney or Keir Starmer, I’d be reiterating to them what’s at stake here. You’ve got energy to think about; you’ve got jobs to think about and you’ve got the future of our young people to think about. Let’s first secure the position by purchasing the site for a pound.

“Sir Keir has promised to put up £200m, well let’s use that as a starter for 10, because he put up £600m for an Ineos factory in Belgium. Let’s get business leaders in from across the region and include the unions and some of the workforce, and then discuss how we use that money now to retain the jobs. And then set about producing a package that’s attractive to other investors and push forward a properly just transition.

“I’d be in favour of retaining it in state ownership for five years with the proviso that you can come out of this and aim at a public/private partnership so that the taxpayers get their money back. That’s the only way it works. “I don’t believe everything should be in public ownership. I believe in rescuing a situation to get it to a strong position that delivers value for money and the heart of the community is protected. There are loads of ways to cut a deal, but you need deal-makers to make it happen.”

I tell her that we’re talking about a government which gave away a massive chunk of our coastline to the richest oil firms in the world for £700m, a fraction of their annual profits. This mob couldn’t sell water in the Sahara. She maintains a diplomatic silence.

Dr Macklin’s been in a similar situation before. In 2009, she produced and developed her ‘Halo’ masterplan for Diageo’s old Johnnie Walker site which she secured for a nominal £1. This was a long and sinewy two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of engaging with East Ayrshire Council and the Scottish and UK governments which lasted until 2022 when phase one of the site regeneration was realised. It’s currently on track to deliver a GDP of more than £200m with the promise of 1500 jobs.

Phase Two, involving an affordable housing development, is happening outside her window as we talk. It builds on her success with her KLIN property business of identifying brownfield sites and decaying listed buildings in disadvantaged communities across Scotland and transforming them into affordable housing and commercial hubs.

My eyes usually mist over when I hear the phrase ‘just transition’. There’s rarely any justice in it for working class communities. She sympathises with my cynicism. “However, I think I can speak from a position of strength on this one,” she says. “I’m sitting on probably the most sustainable project in Scotland. “This building is powered by 175 solar panels. We have a windfarm which is being monitored by Strathclyde University. We’re six years ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement, based on the statistics from promoting the technology here.

“But there must be a common sense aspect too. You cannot shut gas and oil fields when the economy is tanking. You cannot shut the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields and call it Just Transition. The Greens think this is the way to go, but this is a party who’ve constantly failed and cost us millions with their schemes while they were in government, such as the chaotic Deposit Return scheme.

“I don’t have any personal gripes against the individuals concerned but it was good when the SNP finally ditched them as it freed the government up to talk about the bread and butter core policies and issues that matter to economically challenged areas as well as the business community. My dad always told me to stick to what you know. And to me, the Greens know nothing about how to run an economy.”

We discuss the perception in working class communities that the political classes in Scotland have cut them loose and no longer even attempt to engage with them and their everyday concerns. Dr Macklin is on solid ground here too. She was building a successful career advising blue-chip clients in London and New York for one of the UK’s biggest banks before she was struck down by endometriosis, compelling her to return to her home town and a career epiphany. She’s also overcome dyslexia.

She took over her dad’s building firm KILN and began her mission to revitalise neglected, working class communities with a targeted investment strategy combined with a robust and charismatic approach to securing government and state funding. She’s at pains to point out though, that such public funding which helped secure the Johnnie Walker site – though welcome – was not exactly transformational. “Our governing classes are too keen to become involved in issues across the globe that have absolutely nothing to do with them,” she says. “I’m from a working-class background and aspired to better and nicer things and putting wealth back into the system so that others can have them too.

“In Scotland though, there are too many textbook revolutionaries who want you to believe they’re one of the people, yet refuse to give the people any power. They’re actually taking the power away through the people, and that’s unacceptable.”

If you’ve not been to Kilmarnock recently, you might not have seen the Halo building with its signature, circular steel installation atop, signifying not something spiritual or ethereal but simply that good things are happening down underneath. On one level it’s a thrumming hub of creativity supporting start-up businesses with affordable rents and access to expertise and counselling. Larger, quoted enterprises have begun to set up shop here too. Lit up in the early evening, it has a sleek, black aesthetic which would rest easily in the business sectors of London, Tokyo and New York. It’s important to Dr Macklin though, that such a grand building is part of Kilmarnock’s couthier skyline.

“Successful companies know when they walk in here that this is a serious place with a design spec that matches anything they’ll find in the world’s big business centres. But it also tells the community here that they can be part of something big too.“We lost 700 jobs when Diageo moved to Edinburgh and the heart of the town centre was taken away. I want this place to be a community asset, a vehicle for attracting good jobs that pay properly back to my home town.”