Salmond’s astonishing election night
It was the landslide victory that paved the way for the referendum. But even the Nationalists were stunned by the scale of the 2011 win ...the leader turned the air blue as the results came in
I’VE been involved in lots of campaigns over the last 25 years,’ reflected SNP chief executive Peter Murrell a few weeks after the 2011 Holyrood election. ‘But in that time, I encountered very few that actually had a clear strategy.’ He continued: ‘ As robust as any military strategy, as carefully thought out and as detailed. We had a race plan, we knew our speed, our tactics, how to compete, when to hit the front, when to sprint and, most importantly, what victory would look like.’
Angus Robertson, the Moray MP who ran the campaign, preferred a golfing comparison. ‘You work hard on the swing and practise a lot, get a good set of clubs, then get on your favourite course with your favourite tee and the best ball you can get. You then get the biggest driver out of the bag, adopt the perfect stance, breathe perfectly, swing – and hit that ball straighter and harder than you’ve ever hit it before.’
Robertson’s golfing analogy was apt. Not only was Alex Salmond a keen golfer but in the runup to May 2011 he played the political game straight down the middle. ‘The SNP campaign team’, wrote former party adviser Ewan Crawford in The Scotsman, ‘can reflect on the great- est achievement in modern Scottish political history.’
By the time Salmond arrived at the Aberdeenshire count at around 4am the morning after polls closed, it was clear the party he had led – on and off – for the past 21 years was set for a victory hitherto unimaginable.
Amid a scrum of cameras, he struggled to adhere to his decision not to give any interviews. ‘Are you surprised?’ asked Sky News’s James Matthews several times. ‘People are talking about it being historic.’ Salmond patted him on the back and replied: ‘Well, it seems pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?’
On the counting floor, the First Minister embraced longstanding party workers, some of whom had campaigned for him in Banff and Buchan nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Lingering behind the podium before his declaration, the SNP leader chatted with aides. ‘He was clearly excited about it, but was also incredibly calm,’ recalled one. ‘He’d been awake right through, but while everyone was tired, he was just getting sharper.’
At 4.16am, Salmond was re-elected with a massive majority.
In his victory speech, he thanked his wife Moira and declared that the SNP could ‘finally claim that we have lived up to that accolade as the National Party of Scotland’.
He then linked his overwhelming mandate to extending Holyrood’s powers: ‘Which is why in this term of the parliament we will bring forward a referendum and trust the people with Scotland’s own constitutional future.’
In the course of 24 hours, a ballot on independence had gone from abstract
‘The great herds of Labour have gone for ever’
possibility to a concrete political reality.
An hour-and-a-half after winning his seat, Salmond was still giving interviews, as one newspaper observed, ‘with no hint of running out of steam’. After being miked up for STV, a reporter told him they were about to come to him for a live interview. ‘You’d better,’ he responded, letting a little of his well- known arrogance slip through, ‘hundreds of people want to speak to me tonight.’
Asked by another journalist about Labour’s losses, Salmond said: ‘This idea that Labour had ownership over parts of Scotland, well, that’s gone for ever, hasn’t it. I suppose it’s a bit like the American bison. I mean, I dare say we’ll still see one or two dotted about here and there – but the great herds of Labour have gone for ever.’
Although this was typical Salmond hyperbole, one accepted rule of Scottish politics had been turned on its head – no longer did Labour automatically benefit in Scotland from Conservative rule at Westminster. Amid dramatic scenes in Haddington’s Corn Exchange, for example, Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray retained his seat by only 151 votes.
Just after 6am, a ‘very gracious’ Gray called Salmond to congratulate him on a historic win. Indeed, the scale of the result clearly came as a shock even to the SNP leader, who admitted he was ‘finding it difficult to catch up with the amazing movements towards the SNP’. His audible disbelief was almost broadcast by the BBC after he was told the SNP had beaten Labour in Clydebank and Milngavie. ‘F*** me,’ he said in an unguarded moment, later asking an aide to check no fewer than three times if it was true.
SNP officials had already realised they were on course for an overall majority – but, as per the plan, that prospect was not communicated to anyone beyond HQ. Based on information coming in from around the country, they settled on 66 seats – later revised to 69.
A more cautious Peter Murrell preferred to stick with the lower figure, knowing Holyrood’s election system had been designed to prevent any party gaining an overall majority. Either figure, however, constituted a majority. On being told about this at 6.30am, Salmond simply murmured: ‘That’s not possible.’
But it was. ‘He hadn’t even thought about it,’ said an adviser, ‘so he was somewhat overwhelmed. At that point, we just thought, “This can’t be right”.’
The result that officially ‘broke the system’ came in the North-East of Scotland, Salmond’s home region. There, the SNP had already won all ten constituencies – and as Friday progressed won a regional list seat too, something that mortified psephologist Professor David Denver. Not five minutes earlier, he had confidently told BBC Radio Scotland such an outcome was impossible.
Next, the SNP awaited confirmation it had won a crucial 65th seat. In due course, a screen at party HQ confirmed that, following a recount, SNP candidate David Torrance (no relation to this author) had won Kirkcaldy. Before the BBC feed had even cut to the voice of Fife Council’s
returning officer, the room was in uproar. ‘Propping herself up on the desk as if still overwhelmed by what had unfolded before her’, Nicola Sturgeon made a short speech to
‘It was about competence, not the constitution’
party workers. ‘ Without the effort and contribution that all of you have made, we wouldn’t be standing here today, making history. Thank you all so much. Enjoy it. You are history makers.’
It is often said the victors write history – and, of course, even victors can make mistakes. Although the SNP genuinely believed, and continued to believe until after Salmond made his victory speech later that day, that Kirkcaldy was the party’s 65th seat, it was, in fact, Clackmannanshire and Dunblane, which declared at 2.40pm, 25 minutes before Kirkcaldy.
Nevertheless, the SNP had done it; and within an hour, Prime Minister David Cameron had issued a statement congratulating the SNP on ‘this emphatic win’ – but warning that if it wanted to hold a referendum, he would ‘campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every fibre I have’.
Salmond had gone home for some rest. Later, when all the results were in, it became clear the SNP had seized a remarkable 45.4 per cent of the constituency vote to Labour’s 31.7 per cent; and 44 per cent of the regional list to Labour’s 26.3 per cent. This translated into 69 SNP MSPs to Labour’s 37.
Even more remarkably, when the regional list vote was later analysed by constituency, it revealed the Nationalists had won 69 out of 73.
Salmond’s campaign to position the SNP in the ‘mainstream’ of Scottish political opinion while challenging Labour’s dominance in West-Central Scotland had finally come to pass, a mere 21 years after the fledgling party leader had first promised his members precisely that.
But then, he had always been one to play the long game. In 2007, voters had been apprehensive, but willing to give the SNP and its leader a chance; in 2011 they knew what they were getting: a First Minister they respected, a ministerial team they reckoned had done a good job and a series of populist policies which were, well, popular.
‘It was about competence, not the constitution,’ said James Mitchell, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh.
A few hours later, Salmond struck a statesmanlike tone as he spoke outside Prestonfield House Hotel in Edinburgh. ‘Later this evening,’ he said, ‘I will be speaking to the Prime Minister, laying down markers as to what this result and this mandate mean in terms of Scotland’s relationship with the United Kingdom.’
That, in retrospect, was an ambiguous choice of words, hinting at the possibility of a constitutional settlement short of independence. Indeed, figuring out the SNP’s next move would occupy the re-elected First Minister and his closest advisers for the next year-and-a-half.