Slippery Salmond deserves a giant raspberry

ON August 11 l ast year, dismal summer weather was making Alex Salmond and his wife Moira late for dinner with the Queen at Balmoral. It was the first time he had ever kept Her Majesty waiting and the then First Minister felt guilty.

We know this because Mr Salmond narrates the tale himself in his memoir, The Dream Shall Never Die. The anecdote leaps off the page as one of the very few in the book where the Yes campaign leader has anything gracious to say about a No sympathiser. We assume the Queen and the subject stretching every sinew to rip the UK apart were not as one on the question of Scottish independence.

En route, Mr Salmond hatched a suitably obsequious plan to make amends to the Monarch: he stopped off at Longley’s Smiddy near the village of Meigle in Strathmore for some of its fine raspberries.

‘What do you take as a gift for the woman who has everything?’ the author asks those battle-weary readers still clinging gamely to the grim narrative nearly 150 pages in.

‘A few punnets of raspberries grown near Glamis Castle, the late Queen Mother’s family home. Her Majesty is delighted. We eat them for dinner.’

What a fine fellow. What a charmi ng connoisseur of Scotland’s larder. What balderdash.

Just over a month after that Balmoral meeting, Salmond narrowly failed in his lifetime’s ambition of wrenching Scotland away from England and the rest of the UK. His was a campaign powered in l arge part by the politics of resentment, by sneering disdain for the public schooleducated, ruling elite – men like David Cameron, dismissed in Mr Salmond’s book when the PM was visiting Stirling as ‘a Tory toff on a day trip’.

Hypocritical

This playing-to-the-gallery inverted snobbery must rank as the least appealing of Mr Salmond’s strategies for currying favour with his ‘ain folk’. ( The regular raids on the poetry of Robert Burns for wistfully apposite verse surely runs a close second.) But remarks such as these about Mr Cameron also strike me as glaringly hypocritical in the face of the shameless smarm reserved for the Head of State, whose background, after all, is not without privilege.

We should not, of course, expect consistency from a political opportunist.

Having proved unequal to the task of wrenching Scotland away from England, the now ex-First Minister is to be found in London – trying to wrench England away from Scotland.

And, because too few politicians give Mr Salmond a proper earful the way Tory defence minister Anna Soubry did on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, it is working. One of the most saddening aspects of the referendum campaign for me was the readiness of many English onlookers to throw up their hands and say: ‘To hang with it, just give the whingeing Jocks their bleeding independence if they’re so desperate for it. They all seem to hate us anyway – and we’ll probably be better off…’

That particular chorus began early, at a time when the polls still clearly showed the vast majority of Scots had no appetite for independence at all. On the contrary, they were against it. The chorus persisted and, unsurprisingly, grew more widespread as the gap narrowed.

The English- made fiction suited Mr Salmond, of course. Anything which inspired crossBorder antipathy could only work in the Yes campaign’s favour. The impatience of the English towards their Scottish neighbours then is rebranded today as cold rage and open hostility. And the architect of the brand? That old cynic Alex Salmond.

‘We haven’t lost after all,’ said the chuckling ceremonial chieftain as he toured the television studios in London. ‘If you hold the balance, then you hold the power.’

Revolution

Power, in Mr Salmond’s estimation, to dictate the next UK budget if a minority Labour administration is forced to turn to the SNP for support after the General Election. Power to rule over English lives as well as Scottish ones.

‘The sheer gall of the man,’ observe our Union partners in England. ‘First he loses the referendum on home soil, then he presumes to foist his Jocko revolution on the lot of us.’

‘Rebuild Hadrian’s Wall now!’ goes up the scream. ‘Ditch the whole bally lot of them before they sink us all!’

Music to Mr Salmond’s ears. The former First Minister and parliamentary candidate for t he Gordon constituency enjoys calling himself an Anglophile. It may even be true that he i s. Certainly his widely suspected preference for the hardball played in the Palace of Westminster boys’ club over the netball played in Holyrood was one of the great ironies of his bid to consign Scottish MPs to history.

But a far grander passion than his love of England is his love of winning. And in his vengeful campaign to turn a defeat into a victory, Mr Salmond the supposed Anglophile is making his fellow Scots reviled in England.

I don’t believe for a second he actually wants his party to call the shots in areas of the Union where the SNP does not even field MPs. To do so would be to govern without a mandate – exactly the thing he has argued for years the Tory Government in Westminster has been doing in Scotland.

Instead he seeks to antagonise and exploit divisions between our countries wherever he finds them.

It is the tawdry, shameful pursuit of a political play-actor.

People on both sides of the Border should know better than to indulge him.