Tribute to Alex Salmond

Alex Salmond: 31 December 1954 – 12 October 2024 | GARY DOAK / Alamy Stock Photo

Undoubtedly the greatest politician of his generation, Alex Salmond was affable, avuncular with time for everyone, a swashbuckling debater who peppered his table talk with quotes from Robert Burns and the King James Version.

He was also a sneering, snarling phone-flinger and a political fixer who could teach Don Corleone a thing or two.

Salmond’s absence from the stage has exposed the shortcomings of the pygmies who followed only too clearly. Look round Holyrood now. Look round the Scots at Westminster and who is there like Salmond – or like the man Salmond used to be?

With him at the helm, the Scottish National Party went from protest group on the tartan fringe of politics, to battering at the gates of independence. Alex Salmond probably got closer to destroying the United Kingdom than the Luftwaffe ever did.

When we met in 1992, Alex Salmond was leader of just three SNP MPs. He knew – we all knew – that John Major’s election victory was a watershed for Scottish politics.

Within days it led to the formation of the Scotland United movement and a growing demand for devolution.

Dominoes were starting to fall. Publicly, Salmond dismissed the Blair government’s plan for devolution as “a confidence trick, aimed at saving the Union by buying off Scotland with a mess of administrative pottage”.

But he saw the Scottish Parliament as a step on the road to the independence he had dreamed of since his grandad told him stories of the Stewart kings while wandering the streets of Linlithgow.

He was wrong – but only just. Once inside Holyrood, he kept chipping away, not with just three members anymore but 35 and then 47 – just one more than Labour but enough to seize control of the parliament and dare the others to topple him. They did not dare.

In 2011 Salmond won an outright majority at Holyrood despite a voting system specifically designed to make sure that never happened. The clock was ticking on the independence referendum.

Of course, an awful lot happened between devolution in 1999 and the victory of 2011. Salmond had quit as leader, for one thing. And then he came back to steady the ship after a disastrous run by caretaker manager John Swinney.

It was a supremely arrogant gesture. Halfway through the campaign to choose a successor, he simply swatted Roseanna Cunningham aside and told Nicola Sturgeon to drop out and hold on to his coat tails.

With Salmond at the helm, the Scottish National Party went from protest group on the tartan fringe of politics, to battering at the gates of independence

It worked and even when he was acting as a puppet master with no seat in Holyrood, all the marionettes danced to Salmond’s tune.

But every political career ends in failure and while Salmond left the stage with dignity the day after Scotland said “No” to independence, his last 10 years were, frankly, embarrassing.

It started with an autobiography revealing that Salmond was brilliant at everything and had absolutely no part in the failure of the referendum, which was entirely the fault of everybody else.

Then something happened. Nicola Sturgeon turned against him and backed government-funded action culminating in a dozen sex-crime accusations before the High Court.

I was there when he was arrested, walking into Edinburgh Sheriff Court to answer the horrific allegations. The look in that man’s eyes will never leave me.

Months later, every charge was rejected by the jury and Salmond walked out a free man, his legacy in ruins. His only course was to admit years of secret sleaze but, while he was “no saint” he had not harassed anyone. It was a kamikaze defence.

Then came his decision to sign up with the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, RT.

I was the only journalist in the room the night he made that announcement and I asked him outright: “Is there nobody you won’t work for?” He gave his usual, dismissive chuckle and said: “They used to ask me that when I wrote a column for The Sun.”

 Only Salmond in decline could find a moral equivalence between nipples on Page 3 and Novichok on the streets of Salisbury. 

But I’m a Scotsman, just as Salmond was. I will choose to forget that Alex Salmond and remember instead the patriot who spent his life on our nation.

Give me again all that was there,
Give me the sun that shone!
Give me the eyes, give me the soul,
Give me the lad that’s gone!

Related

Prime Minister Liz Truss Leads Tributes To Queen Elizabeth, “The Rock On Which Our Country Was Built”

By John Johnston

08 Sep 2022

PoliticsHome Newsletters

Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.