Great political leadership is about belief. It’s about connecting to millions and injecting confidence about what’s possible. Thus it is, inescapably, about that slippery word: charisma. You know it when you see it. Everybody does. Alex Salmond had it.
Adore him or loathe him – Alex didn’t produce a beige response among many Scottish voters – his greatest achievement was to have persuaded millions of people in Scotland that independence from the UK was a sensible, normal, practical possibility towards which their country was marching. His belief was so deep-rooted, so burning, that it proved contagious.
I don’t say that to vindicate nationalism as an ideology, or to brush aside the angry divide it produced inside Scotland during Salmond’s time, or indeed how to smooth away the personal behaviour which caused his deep rift with Nicola Sturgeon. It’s just a fact.
He had a hypnotic conviction. I have known him for so long, as I used to remind him, that I knew him when he was slim. In the early 1980s he was a lean, left-wing economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, specialising in the economy of the North Sea oil industry.
I was a young business reporter, and he was a great source of stories. “The great thing about me,” he’d say, “is that I am a black bitch.” This was how people from Linlithgow used to describe themselves, a term originating from a mediaeval legend about the town: Alex always enjoyed making an impression.
He was always deeply steeped in Scottish mediaeval history, which he had studied under some great academics at St Andrews University. This had led him away from the politics of his parents. He described his mother as a “Winston Churchill Conservative” but as a student he moved to the left and to nationalism – as a time when the SNP was deeply socially conservative.
Unusually for someone in a bank headquarters, Salmond had a bust of Lenin in his room and a poster repeating the words of the Scottish writer Tom Nairn: “Scotland will only be free when the last Presbyterian minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.”
This abnormal combination of business chops with radical left-wing instincts became his characteristic political tone. He was heavily involved with setting up the socialist “79 group” which, in the Thatcher years, tilted nationalism leftwards in a way which had once seemed impossible. Salmond himself later moved on from the explicitly “socialist and Republican Scotland” the 79 groupers wanted, becoming an increasingly wily advocate of the economic case for independence as he tried to widen the appeal of the SNP.
In that, his greatest long-term achievement was winning over Scottish Catholics to the idea of independence. It’s easy to forget that the SNP went through a long period of frankly Protestant chauvinism (“Soon, No Pope” people said it stood for) with a distinctly anti-Irish tinge.
Salmond himself did more than anyone else to turn that around, using his friendship with Glasgow’s Archbishop Cardinal Winning, and the question of whether the Scottish Parliament would have devolutionary powers to change the abortion law, to great effect. Ironically, the SNP would go on under Sturgeon to be among the most socially liberal of British parties but in the 1980s this was a big part of the story of how the Nationalists upended “Labour Scotland”.
Alex was a man who loved to debate. Indeed, apart from a large glass of something warming and a hefty plate in front of him, he loved nothing more than a good argument. He would dive into any subject and argue the toss with extraordinary eloquence and passion. Plenty of people thought him an intolerable, cheeky upstart, and a bit of a bully. But he alone, by himself, was perhaps worth a quarter of the votes won for independence in the 2014 referendum.
A strong first minister, and effective mentor to Sturgeon, the saddest, grimaced part of his story is the breakdown in his relationship with her following allegations against him of sexual harassment while he was in office.
He was eventually acquitted in court of a dozen charges, while one of attempted rape received a “not proven” verdict. He always maintained the charges were part of a political conspiracy against him by Sturgeon’s supporters. The feud between them went very deep. If his behaviour as first minister sometimes had echoes of absolute monarchy, the feud was something out of earlier Scottish history.
Salmond, outside the SNP, created his own independence party, Alba, though this was more of a splinter in the nationalist camp than a full split. Without its creator and guiding force, Alba’s future must be in question. That this is not true of the SNP itself – that it has, despite its failures, become a permanent force – is Salmond’s true memorial.
A great lover of good living, gambling and rich food, Alex Salmond had not been a lean radical for many decades. Had he looked after himself half as well as he looked after the cause which shaped his life, he would have been with us for many years yet.
