Policies and principles matter but if you want to get ahead in politics you need personality. There are few personalities as big as Alex Salmond and his death leaves the Scottish nationalist cause smaller, duller and more distant from the people.
Salmond took the SNP from the margins of relevance to the centre of power and attracted ordinary Scots to the independence movement. Through his political style, manner and skill, he dragged independence out of draughty halls sparsely populated by anoraks and oddballs and shared it with voters who had never felt part of the process.
If he had an ideology it was popular nationalism, a welding together of constitutional politics and democratic populism. He was a rabble-rouser in the cause of the people and he convinced many that their cause was independence.
That this cause would have visited economic calamity on the people is only testament to Salmond’s powers of persuasion. By sheer force of will – and an elastic relationship with the facts – Salmond was able to convince almost half the country to vote to make themselves poorer.
Like a good many populists, he was an insider posing as an outsider, but he understood how to talk to people.
Alex Salmond, with former Primer Minister David Cameron, dragged the SNP from the fringes into mainstream politics
Salmond was a boomer and it showed. For much of his lifetime, British politics was increasingly concerned with casting off the constraints of party and policy to communicate with the average voter on a personal level. Salmond excelled at this.
His personality, smug and sneery to some, was impish and demotic to others. There was a tongue in his cheek, a twinkle in his eye, and a bite to his wit. Like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, Salmond was watchable not only for his own blustering routine but for the frothing, uncontrollable rage it prompted in some of his opponents.
Almost everyone I know who went during the course of the 2014 referendum from No or Undecided to Yes mentioned Salmond when explaining their change of heart. Many also cited the negativity of the No campaign or what they saw as imperious threats from Westminster, but Salmond was the common thread.
They weren’t necessarily convinced by the case he made but they liked the way he carried himself. He may have been light on answers but he had just enough personality to cover for it.
That well-rehearsed chuckle to deride his rivals, the ferocious frown when contemplating unwelcome information, and that thunderous temper that let loose on anyone who crossed him.
Salmond was able to connect with voters on a personal level
Salmond was a charming bully and a consummate showman, his spectacular ego and dazzling hubris only making him more compelling. There are any number of words you can call a politician who commissions a monument to his policy on higher education funding but ‘boring’ isn’t one of them.
It may be a source of consternation for some that the public is attracted to such personas, or that electoral choices are made on seemingly flippant grounds such as personality, but that is how democracy works. Voters don’t just get to decide where their cross goes, they get to decide why, too.
British politics changed considerably in Salmond’s later life in terms of communicating with the electorate.
Today, political leaders see themselves as enlightened elites and are concerned with how they can talk over or around the voters in order to pursue policies that are in their best interests.
These elites struggle to recreate the democratic manner or populist bonhomie that Salmond affected because the audience for their pronouncements are no longer voters but other members of the elite, whether elected officials, journalists, academics or activists.
With Salmond, the voters were in on the joke. With his successors, there is no place in politics for mischief, levity or personality. When you see your role as defending democracy from the voters, a sense of humour seems like a dangerous indulgence.
The SNP is as captured by this new genre of politics as the Labour Party, but the difference is that the SNP doesn’t exist only to win elections. Its purpose is to deliver independence for Scotland. Which is more likely to achieve that: the populist, Salmond style of leadership or the insular, elite approach of his successors?
The answer is not black and white. Salmond got 45 per cent of Scots to vote for independence, which was impressive but short of the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to win and far short of the two-thirds or so that would have allowed Scotland to move to independence as a united country rather than one evenly – and bitterly – divided. Nicola Sturgeon, meanwhile, convinced 50 per cent to vote SNP in 2015 and oversaw extended periods in which polls showed majority support for independence.
Yet she failed to capitalise on this and, with her ill-judged Supreme Court gambit, set back progress towards her party’s goal. The Sturgeon style of leadership was entrenched by Humza Yousaf and has largely remained under John Swinney.
So the two approaches have their shortcomings, but one does appear to have been more fruitful for the nationalists than the other. Under Salmond, great strides were made towards independence. Under Sturgeon, the striding continued, until it stopped, then went in reverse.
Yet if Sturgeon damaged the cause, she is far from the only one. It was Salmond who orchestrated the Alba schism and he did so out of spite, vanity and a desperate clinging to every last flicker of the public spotlight. Alba’s electoral impact on the SNP was negligible but the psychological toll of pitting the two titans of Scottish nationalism against one another at the head of rival parties should not be underestimated.
Salmond celebrating winning the Banff and Buchan seat in 1987 with wife Moira
Salmond masterminded the SNP’s bid to secure the 2014 referendum
It was Salmond who was largely responsible for the Yes movement existing and Salmond who, in his last major contribution to public life, fractured that movement in the messiest manner possible. He put a lot of energy into independence but he took a lot back out, too.
The hurdles that now lie in the path of independence are daunting. It would not be a matter of merely finding another Alex Salmond, an exacting task as it is. Salmond didn’t make the 2014 referendum happen. It was Salmond and a confluence of events: an SNP majority at Holyrood, the collapse of Labour and the Lib Dems, a highly unpopular coalition, austerity, and a UK Government willing to permit a vote on independence.
Another Salmond would have to sell a high tax/low spending fiscal model, a hard border with England, nuclear disarmament in a more dangerous world and the conditions for any EU accession.
And let’s not forget that, while another Salmond might be a formidable force, the original Salmond still lost. To get independence, Scottish nationalism needs a figurehead who may never exist and a set of circumstances that may never fall into place. None of us has a crystal ball but it’s beginning to look like ‘once in a generation’ was overly optimistic.
Salmond got his referendum because he terrified a weak and feckless Number 10 under David Cameron. The field of contenders for worst ever Prime Minister has expanded somewhat in recent years but Cameron was especially stupid and craven. His answer to every constitutional question was to hand yet more powers to the SNP, and granting the referendum was an unconscionable gamble with the future of the United Kingdom.
The truth is that Salmond was a much more skilled and ruthless political operator. He knew that Cameron lacked gumption and used this to secure a referendum that Westminster was under no legal obligation to give him. He figured Cameron would rather strategise away his Scotland problem than stand up resolutely for the Union.
It is an under-appreciated facet of Salmond’s career that he was a better reader of his opponents than they were of him.
Salmond used these insights to wreak merry havoc on British politics in 2014 and it is unlikely Westminster will ever give such a hostage to fortune again. While we should never underestimate the tendency of the British state to punch itself in the face, things got too close for comfort ten years ago and those lessons have been absorbed.
Saying No to the Scottish parliament, and absorbing the political consequences, is preferable to putting separatists in the driving seat again. Don’t believe me? Look how brusquely the Labour government has slapped down talk within its own ranks of a separate Scottish visa system. The sleeping giant isn’t asleep any more.
That is not the only obstacle that stands between the Nationalists and their ultimate goal. You can’t inspire people if you don’t speak their language and the SNP displays little interest in even trying to strike up a conversation with the voters. Their trouncing in the general election dramatised the chasm that has been allowed to open between the Nationalists and their voters. The SNP stopped talking, the electorate stopped listening, and the ballots went elsewhere.
Reviving the independence movement against this backdrop will be a mighty feat. Swinney will not be the man to do it. Whatever his qualities, he is a caretaker leader approaching the conclusion of his political career. He may be able to prevent the ship from sinking but he is unlikely to steer it back on course.
Perhaps there is a leader within the next generation who will be better placed to address the next generation of voters, but for now talk of independence sounds not only tiresome but outlandish. We’ve had this debate for more than a decade and the circumstances at home and abroad have made it even less relevant.
The thought of independence may have produced a thrill of optimism in 2014 but in 2024, when the Scottish Government is cutting universal benefits and war is tearing through the world map, the suggestion that Scotland should go it alone is met with bewilderment by the average voter. They don’t want to talk about independence and they don’t want to hear about it.
It doesn’t help that those tasked with talking to them do so in the soulless cadence of a human resources manager, a chilly register of insider jargon and aloof certainty. Alex Salmond did not talk to them like that. He addressed them as equals, not like children who needed to be scolded into doing what they were told, and they responded by giving him a hearing they would not afford the leaders who followed him.
He didn’t talk down to them, he talked them up into believing Scotland had what it takes to go it alone. Where his successors insist, he inspired. It was mostly bunkum but many were in the market for bunkum.
With Salmond’s passing the political moment he helped to create is passing too. Politics is different now and the tone in which it is conducted is ill-suited to persuasion. When everyone talks like an insider, it becomes harder to bring new people into the fold. The current style of leadership makes outsiders of the voters.
People die but ideas don’t. Salmond knew as much: he titled his book The Dream Will Never Die. But dreams on their own aren’t enough. They need leaders, men and women of courage and conviction and ability, to give them substance. That means, at a minimum, being able to answer outstanding questions and allay niggling doubts.
Today’s SNP leadership doesn’t know how to do that. It prefers conversations where all parties are already in agreement to the messy business of trying to convince the sceptical and the indifferent. Salmond got as far as he did because he had faith in the people. His successors regard the people with impatience if not hostility.
The independence movement is reduced by Alex Salmond’s death and by its failure to produce a contemporary leader who can connect with the voters the way he did. There is no path to independence that goes around the Scottish public. They must be persuaded to join the journey, but first the leadership of the SNP has to want them there.
