Remembering Alex Salmond: How the former First Minister left his mark on Scottish politics
29 October 2024, 05:06 | Updated: 29 October 2024, 07:42
Today Alex Salmond will be laid to rest in his adopted town of Strichen in Aberdeenshire. But will he rest in peace?
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His loved ones will certainly hope so, but there is much unfinished business when it comes to his life - and indeed legacy - that Alex Salmond could well haunt Scottish politics for many years to come yet. For love him or loathe him - and there are plenty on either side of that divide - without a doubt he changed Scotland, Scottish politics, even the UK, utterly.
I last saw him a month ago when he spoke at a press conference, supporting Peter and Florence Fanning in their bid to take both the UK and Scottish governments to court over the decision to withdraw the winter fuel payment from all pensioners, bar those who receive pension credit.
He was relishing the prospect of the legal challenge to come, always up for the fight, but he did not look well. Two weeks later, he died after delivering a speech on independence in North Macedonia.
So how will he be remembered? Today inside Strichen Parish Church his friends Kenny MacAskill and Fergus Ewing will give glowing eulogies.
On Wednesday, MSPs will get to their feet in Holyrood to deliver their own tributes. No doubt they will walk a fine line - not wanting to be too effusive about a political opponent but still be respectful of his achievements as First Minister of Scotland.
They will likely point to his cannyness as a political operator, of his taking the SNP, a party which was at one time dismissed as fringe and full of cranks, into government, of the remarkable feat in a parliament elected by proportional representation of winning an overall majority in 2011, to fact that he almost delivered his life-long ambition in 2014.
Some may well say the latter was ultimately not his finest hour - that he divided Scotland, and that those divisions have never healed, and that indeed his best moment politically came long before then when he convinced his somewhat fundamentalist party to embrace devolution and turn to a more gradualist approach.
Will any of them want to get into his latter years? It is hard to think of Salmond these days without picturing him outside Edinburgh’s High Court, tired yet relieved, after being cleared of allegations of sexual assault - the day the country went into Covid lockdown.
Will they get into the wilder reaches of conspiracy theory that he only ended up there because of the machinations of political foes and the state so he could never make a return to frontline politics? Unlikely - those are the debates being thrashed out over and again on X and in blog posts, in parliament they will try and rise above the fray.
But the fact that those theories abound underline how much Salmond was a man who prompted both fierce loyalty, and fierce opposition. Undoubtedly he was a brilliant political operator at times, a man of quick wit, and a debater who could run rings around most people.
Undoubtedly he was also someone who could be short-tempered, demanding, and to some former staff even bullying.
It also cannot be forgotten that he was still in the process of undertaking legal action against the Scottish Government over its handling of the investigation into sexual harassment allegations against him. He had already won £500,000 in court, and was confident of a second victory.
So Wednesday will be tricky for current FM John Swinney.
The Scottish Parliament is 25 years old this year. The independence referendum was a decade ago. Reflections on where Scotland has been and where it’s going have been written at length.
The passing of Alex Salmond has intensified all of that, for there can be no reflection of Holyrood without his role in its first quarter century.
Indeed there can be no reflection of the history of the SNP without his role in it, even if at the end he no longer supported the party which made him, and which he at one time shaped in his image.
There have been a lot of words written about him since he died. Many more are yet to be written. It is unlikely that any minds will be changed about him. But what is true is, as his former speechwriter Andy Collier has said in recent days, “when he spoke, people listened”.
