As chief executive of Britain’s smallest local authority, Ian Clark, who has died aged 85, went head to head with Big Oil in the 1970s to secure legislation to protect the Shetland Islands, which remains unparalleled to this day.
An evangelical Christian with an approach to negotiation that was compared unfavourably by one rueful Shell executive to that of Colonel Gaddafi, Clark unexpectedly found himself in the frontline of defence when Shetland was confronted with the North Sea oil boom.
