Curious as to what else Laurence Gove might have written on Tintin, I did a quick google search and found
this article he wrote for the BBC website a few years ago – wrote himself, rather than being "quoted" by a journalist. As you can see, it's fairly accurate, as you'd expect, given he's apparently president of the International Bande Desinée Society, and his opinions are much more measured. True, many of us would disagree with some of his pet theories and statements about Hergé and his characters and books (and quite a few people
have disagreed in the comments section below the article), but that seems fair enough - all within the realm of healthy debate. It's certainly nothing like the mangled mess in the Daily Record piece.
This bolsters my suspicion that the Daily Record journalist is to blame. My guess (a completely uninformed guess, I should stress) is that the journalist was trawling the net for info on Tintin in the week of the movie release, found this old article and skim-read it, maybe phoned the author, then rehashed everything from the original article and interview, mangling all the facts, mis-grasping all the opinions and hyping up the Scottish angle. You can sort of see the unmangled origins of most of the article's wilder statements in the more sober original article.
Assuming something like that is the case, my sympathies to Laurence Gove, and, if he happens to chance upon this thread, my apologies for giving the Daily Record piece more publicity!