The death of Alex Salmond marks not only the passing of a man but of a generation and a style of politics. The former First Minister, who was 69, belonged to the postwar baby boom generation and it showed. He mastered the art of television and was an adept deviser of pithy quotes for newspapers, for those were the dominating news sources of his formative years.
Yet he was also an avid parliamentarian, believing that what was said in the House of Commons mattered, and in this too he was of his era: being ‘a good House of Commons man’ was once an aspiration for all MPs, though few bother to seek this monicker today.
And he was a Nationalist, for when his political consciousness came to be formed, it did so in the late Sixties and the Seventies, when a nationalist spirit was in the air. Winnie Ewing had won Hamilton in 1967, the North Sea had struck oil and the SNP was climbing up the polls.
Salmond, however, had grown up in a nationalist-minded household, and it is perhaps here that his ideological instincts were formed. Whatever the case, the young man who turned up at St Andrews University in 1973 was a fully-formed devotee of Scotland and the restoration of her national sovereignty.
It was as a student that he joined the SNP, but the Salmond of those times was a very different quantity to the political figure Scotland came to know and be led by.
Alex Salmond attending Dressed to Kilt fashion show in New York in 2006
Back then he was a fiery Left-winger and a member of the SNP’s fundamentalist wing, which was on the march to independence and impatient about the pace the rest of the party was taking.
He would eventually drift into the radical ’79 Group, which deemed the SNP too Right wing to win over the Scottish working classes and advocated a lurch to the Left that scandalised the leadership of the day. The ’79 Group was expelled but several of its members were later readmitted and went on to prominent careers in the SNP and its governments.
Political office was still some way away and Salmond needed a career. After graduating, he took up a series of postings as an economist, first behind enemy lines in the Scottish Office, and then at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
But the man was too bright, too charismatic and too ambitious to dedicate his life to price indexes and market surveys, and in 1987 he stood for and won Banff and Buchan, taming the famed ‘Buchan Bulldog’, Sir Albert McQuarrie, a Tory grandee thought unbeatable up to that point.
Just three years later, he was elected leader of the party. These were still the doldrums days of the SNP, not yet forgiven for its role in bringing down James Callaghan’s Labour government and hastening an election which put Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. In Scotland, the Nationalists had a young and energetic figurehead, a smooth talker capable of getting himself chucked out of the Chancellor’s Budget statement and plastering his face across every newspaper and evening bulletin in the process. The Tony Blair era was still a few years away but in some ways Salmond prefigured the man whose Iraq war he used to peel Scottish voters away from Labour.
Like Blair, he was a big personality, a ruthless strategist, a presidential-style leader, and an advanced practitioner of the dark arts of spin.
It was Blair who transformed Salmond’s fortunes and those of his party. By establishing a devolved Scottish parliament, he unwittingly built a new platform from which the SNP could flourish and advance its cause of independence.
Salmond quit as leader in 2000 after a decade in which he made a name for himself, and his party made modest but important gains.
While Salmond moved the party closer to the centre, aspects of his early radicalism occasionally broke through and revealed a politician of dubious judgment – none more so than his notorious description of Nato’s intervention against Serbia, then engaged in what many regard as an attempted ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians, as ‘unpardonable folly’. It was a quote that his opponents never let him forget about.
Despite issuing a Sherman-esque statement in response to speculation that he would recontest the leadership – ‘If nominated I’ll decline, if drafted I’ll defer, and if elected I’ll resign’ – he went on to throw his hat in the ring and, in 2004, returned to the top spot. With him he brought a protégé in the form of Nicola Sturgeon, who would become his deputy and later his fiercest enemy in politics.
By this point, he understood the opportunity that the Scottish parliament offered to the SNP and set about knocking his party into shape for the 2007 election. That poll produced a narrow victory for the SNP, which secured just one seat more than Labour, but the outcome represented a political earthquake. Labour had been defeated in its Scottish heartlands. Scotland was now SNP country.
Alex Salmond is held aloft by supporters after winning Banff and Buchan seat in 1987
The former First Minister pictured with Donald Trump in 2005
Salmond with Sean Connery in New York back in 2006
All smiles as Alex Salmond share a joke with the then Prince Charles in 2007
In 1999 with his party colleagues John Swinney, Nicola Sturgeon and Mike Russell
A dejected Alex Salmond after suffering defeat in the 2014 independence referendum
As First Minister, Salmond set about governing in a populist fashion, prioritising police recruitment and a council tax freeze while passing on swingeing but not yet discernible cuts to local government and beginning a slide in Scottish education that continues to this day. His minority government convinced Scots that the SNP could be trusted to manage the country and Salmond was rewarded in 2011 by a victory for the history books.
Holyrood’s electoral system was designed so no one party would hold a majority of seats, making compromise necessary. Salmond, not one for compromise, let the electoral system know what he thought of it winning with 69 seats – an outright majority. It was an earthquake upon an earthquake.
Salmond was now at the peak of his power and political stature. He was not merely at the summit of Scotland’s politics, he was the mountain. No one dared challenge him. He was in effect a Scottish Louis XIV: l’État, c’est Eck.
The hubris shown in these years would eventually contribute to his undoing, but for now Salmond was calling the shots. The biggest shot of all was demanding, and securing, a referendum on the question: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’
Salmond threw himself into the campaign with gusto, delighting his hordes of admirers but leaving critics despairing of his divisive rhetoric and abrasive manner, and how his campaign was setting Scot against Scot.
In the end, he fell short of the dream of independence but he got too close for comfort. The additional powers heaped on the Scottish parliament in the wake of the referendum revealed just how rattled Westminster had been by 45 per cent of Scots voting for the exit.
He also left Scotland embittered, less at ease with itself, though if this ever troubled him he never showed it. When he resigned in the wake of the referendum, he gave the impression of a man who thought his political career was not yet over.
We cannot talk about Salmond’s rise and his time at the top of public life without addressing the fall.
He did not take well to the removal of the robes of office. Shorn of power and position, an old king without a court, Salmond cut a sometimes desperate figure, making ever-more outlandish interventions that were beneath him in dignity but which nonetheless kept him in the limelight.
Among the more notorious were a fruity Fringe show replete with humour that would have been considered a bit too Seventies even in the Seventies, and a stint as a presenter on Kremlin-backed propaganda channel Russia Today.
This is when relations with Nicola Sturgeon began to publicly disintegrate. He was becoming a distraction, his antics an embarrassment, but he remained intensely popular with party members and voters.
His return to Westminster only re-elevated his public profile and put further strain on the relationship with Sturgeon. He may have been part of the class of 2015, the 56 Nationalist MPs elected to the Commons in a landslide, but there was no doubt that Salmond represented and spoke for his own party: the Alex Salmond party.
Then, the party came to an abrupt end. He was accused of sexual harassment by women he worked with during his time as First Minister and in 2018 the Scottish Government set up an investigation. But the probe itself came under scrutiny and was ruled by the courts to have been ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’ because the inquiry’s head had had contact with the accusers.
Salmond touted this as vindication. But just two weeks later, he was arrested and later charged with a string of sexual offences, up to and including attempted rape. But the courts once again came down on his side, with a jury acquitting him on all charges.
There were dark mutterings from his supporters that he had been framed, but it was not until an inquiry into the Scottish Government’s handling of the matter that the man himself went on the record.
There had been, he said, ‘a malicious and concerted attempt to damage my reputation and remove me from public life in Scotland’.
Salmond described ‘a deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort amongst a range of individuals within the Scottish government and the SNP to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned’.
Among those he named were Liz Lloyd, then chief of staff to Nicola Sturgeon, and Peter Murrell, then SNP chief executive and husband to Sturgeon. Lloyd and Murrell rejected the allegations at the time.
Salmond made yet another return, which proved to be his last, in Alba, a breakaway party that stood against the SNP in the 2021 Holyrood election. While it made almost no electoral impact, it opened a fissure that had been running through the Nationalist movement since its defeat in the 2014 independence referendum.
Alba challenged the SNP on independence strategy, for Salmond believed his old party had become too timid. It dissented from Sturgeon’s embrace of gender ideology and identity politics more generally, with some women who had been long-time SNP members defecting in protest over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
Above all, though, Alba was Salmond personified, a party for a leader who could no longer lead the party he wanted to. While Alba is unlikely to survive him very long, it will be remembered as a spirited attempt to revive a grassroots Nationalism divorced from the shiny, professional, poll-driven New Labour tribute act into which Sturgeon arguably turned the SNP.
In the days and weeks ahead, many words will be spilled over the death of Alex Salmond, and perhaps even tears. Not all those words will be kind, not all those tears will be sincere. That is the way of it when a man of consequence dies.
For good or ill, he was the man who took Scottish Nationalism from the fringes to the mainstream and from there into government, the first time in its history that the SNP had held executive power at Scotland-wide level. He not only renamed the Scottish Executive but redefined the rules of Scottish politics.
A devolved parliament set up by New Labour to ‘kill Nationalism stone dead’ has helped make the SNP the natural party of government. Salmond did that.
Scottish independence, once a cause limited to beery dreams after 90 minutes, is the preferred constitutional outcome of roughly half of voters. Salmond did that.
All of Scotland’s political parties are more outwardly nationalist in their branding and positioning, keen to play up Scottish identity and patriotism. Salmond did that.
We live in a post-Salmond Scotland and will do for some time. How we think about his legacy might change but the legacy itself never will. He renewed a party, revived a movement, and remade a country.
The debates over Salmond’s legacy will be fierce, and so will be those over his character. There is no need, even in these polarised times, to come down on one side or the other. Salmond was a complex man – he was at times a great man and at times an awful man, never as noble as his admirers believed but not quite as dishonourable as his detractors claim.
Alex Salmond made history. He often made it for the worse, but he made it.
