Euan McColm Euan McColm

Alex Salmond’s firebrand reinvention is hard to take

(Photo by Peter Summers/Getty Images)

In power, Alex Salmond was, according to the senior lawyer who successfully defended him against a series of sex charges, ‘an objectionable bully’. Out of power, he breezed into a new career as a presenter on the Kremlin-funded propaganda channel, RT. He maintained his relationship with the broadcaster until the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Salmond deserves to be yesterday’s man. He’s utterly discredited, both morally and politically – and yet, he’s back. The current crisis in the SNP, still under investigation by Police Scotland as a result of fraud allegations, has given Salmond an in. Suddenly, every TV channel and radio station in the country wants to hear from Nicola Sturgeon’s mentor-turned-enemy. It has become hard to avoid hearing Salmond on some programme or other, expressing his deep sorrow that things had gone so badly wrong under his treacherous successor.

Salmond deserves to be yesterday’s man. He’s utterly discredited, both morally and politically – and yet, he’s back.

Salmond and Sturgeon’s relationship (previously businesslike rather than warm) was destroyed by allegations of inappropriate behaviour levelled against him by female civil servants. Sturgeon stood by the accusers and Salmond would never forgive his former protégée. Fast forward a few years and now he’s the self-styled statesman who popped up on Question Time last week to tear apart the SNP’s record in government while positioning himself as one true leader of the Scottish independence movement. His Alba party, he said, was ‘not relying’ on the SNP to progress the independence movement.

The former first minister seeks to rouse the nationalist tribes under the fundamentalist wheeze that all pro-independence parties unite around single candidates in every constituency. He believes that each of these would-be MPs should pledge to initiate independence talks with the prime minister of the day after the election. And there are other firebrand touches to this latest iteration of Salmond. He gained considerable coverage over his assertion that, had he still been First Minister, he’d have refused to allow the transportation of the Stone of Destiny to London for use during the coronation of Charles III. Aye, sure you would’ve, Alex.

But for all this talk, it should be noted that Salmond’s current position on constitutional matters stands in stark contrast to the one he used to advocate. Before he led the SNP from the fringes of Scottish politics and into government, 20 years and more ago, Salmond won the argument that his then party should take a gradualist approach. It was time to tone down the Braveheart stuff and make a pitch to middle Scotland. Salmond is no idiot: his approach worked and the Nats won the first of four consecutive Holyrood elections in 2007 while his strategy lifted support for independence from below 30 per cent to around 45 per cent. 

Yet now we are invited to believe Salmond, once king of the gradualists, has suddenly become a rootin’-tootin’, true-believin’ fundamentalist firebrand while he criticises the SNP for not being bolder with their approach to a second Indyref. Having lost the backing of the SNP’s moderates (people who demand a referendum only every other day) who stuck with Sturgeon and who now endure the leadership of Humza Yousaf, Salmond’s next option was to gather the disaffected into his new Alba party, to say angering things to angry people who’ve bought into a story of Scots victimhood.

As the SNP crisis rumbles on, Salmond has found himself back in the political mainstream. He’s treated as a key player – and if that means spouting the sort of stuff he’d have condemned as madness just a few years ago, then that’s just the game, isn’t it? I’m all for second chances but it’s difficult to square the idea of Salmond as statesman with the man described by his own lawyer, Gordon Jackson KC, during his trial. In remarks that would lead to his resignation as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Jackson was overheard saying of his client:

‘I don’t know much about senior politicians, but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with in a way I don’t think Nicola [Sturgeon] is. I think he was a nasty person to work for… a nightmare to work for.’

If that’s not enough to permanently damage Salmond’s credibility, then his professional relationship with RT should be. That he took a single ruble from Putin’s spin machine should be a matter of unlivedownable shame. I have had, I’m afraid, quite enough of this airbrushing of Alex Salmond’s recent history.

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