Salmond, dancing in a spotlight yet trapped by shadow of his past

IT was a joke about women, it was a coarse joke about women and it wasn’t even a good joke about women. But, amidst the foaming on social media and the general pointand-shriek, one had to admire Nicola Sturgeon’s measured response to the outcry.

‘Occasionally Alex is not as funny as he thinks he is,’ she remarked, having firmly stated that her predecessor as First Minister was in no way a sexist, ‘and perhaps this is an example of a joke which belongs more in the Benny Hill era than in the modern era.’

It put things neatly in perspective – but was also an exquisitely calculated putdown. In any event, the former SNP leader has wisely cut the line from subsequent outings in his Edinburgh Fringe show Alex Salmond… Unleashed.

It’s a sell-out; such a hit he has added on a few more appearances. He appears genuinely to be enjoying himself and, most afternoons, his musings – not to mention banter with guests – make good copy for the following day’s papers.

And yet there is something ever so slightly pathetic about this man – a brilliant Westminster bruiser, a man of character and substance, a man who took command of what was a fringe and faintly nutty political movement and led it all the way to Scottish government – reducing himself to a vaudevillian.

‘All political lives,’ mused Enoch Powell, ‘unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

AND – barring assassination – all statesmen have to decide what to do next, once their professional course has been terminated by treacherous colleagues or an ungrateful electorate.

It is easy in America, where a former president gets to take all the records of his administration with him, can build a museum to his own glory – charmingly, these institutions are called ‘libraries’ – and remains a respected part of the national fabric.

In Britain, things are far more brutal. When Harold Wilson so unexpectedly lost the 1970 general election, he had not even a house of his own to flee to. Mrs Thatcher, in her last night at No10, found the locks had been changed for the Cabinet Office and Gordon Brown – like John Major before him – was broken, impotent and pitiable even before voters finally put him out of our misery.

In the old days, of course, there was the House of Lords: traditionally, an ex-PM got a shiny and hereditary earldom. But Thatcher was the last to sit in the Upper House and Major, Blair, Brown and – in all probability – Cameron are unlikely to follow her.

That’s because membership of the Lords means having to make full public disclosure of everything you earn, which sits badly with the natural urge of most who have held high public office – to become, at last, rapidly and seriously rich.

Some cope better than others. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was more than happy to go on serving his constituents, enjoy his shooting and his fishing, and even to return to government as Foreign Secretary.

Others desperately need work. Churchill, who was persuaded to retire from the premiership only in his 82nd year, threw himself into writing his colossal History of the English- Speaking Peoples. It was a critical and commercial success but by publication his faculties had so deteriorated he was no longer able to write and sank repeatedly into the depression that had always been his enemy.

Anthony Eden wistfully contemplated a return. Harold Macmillan thought – aloud – of commanding some sort of national unity government; and Edward Heath (who remained a baleful Commons presence for decades after his fall) had one of the longest sulks in political history.

Unfortunately, its chief target – Margaret Thatcher – did not profit from his example or grasp how dreadfully it had demeaned him. She became a baleful, bitter ‘back-seat driver’ to John Major and must shoulder some blame for the Tory indiscipline that finally wrecked his government.

Salmond is not actually the first sometime statesman to try his hand at popular entertainment. He has already, like other politicians – Charles Kennedy, Ruth Davidson and Neil Kinnock – had outings on Have I Got News For You.

And ex-PM Wilson woefully helmed two 1979 episodes of a chat show, Friday Night… Saturday Morning, perhaps already hampered by the dementia that finally engulfed him. But Wilson was then still an MP; the voters of Gordon booted Salmond out of the Commons in June, and that is part of his present pathos.

For, whatever you think of Salmond, he was the consummate professional politician.

He had extraordinary mastery of Commons procedures. He was an astute heavyweight behind the scenes; an ebullient grip-and-grin election campaigner, rarely bested in debate and has a gift extraordinarily rare among public men: he never, ever loses his temper.

THAT unflappability of course played into his biggest weakness: a reputation for selfregarding smugness. But we forget how close Salmond came, in September 2014, to epochal achievement – and he might just have done it had the independence referendum been held one week earlier. Whatever you think of Scottish independence, the winning of it would have been a feat for the ages.

To be out of Parliament – either parliament – must be an excruciating position and it is not easy to see a rapid return to the green benches. There is no Tory appetite for a general election in the near future – not while Labour is buoyant in the polls and Jeremy Corbyn plans to turn us into Venezuela. Sturgeon, in all likelihood, is much more eager to find a niche for Angus Robertson than her unscriptable predecessor.

Her gentle rebuke hinted at something else, too. Salmond is no longer quite of our day – essentially, a 1970s person, such as Tom Baker, or The Goodies, and now out of touch and a little embarrassing.

Salmond will always, of course, be a hero to the SNP; but he is already and ineluctably of the SNP’s past and his faintly desperate self-aggrandisement is apt to keep him there. He really is, now, just ‘Alex, frae Strichen.’

There will be no Holywood ending, no stately return to Bute House at the beseeching of a frantic nation. And, beyond the banter and the celebrity guests and the light music and the self-serving anecdotes, there is but one dull and throbbing ache.

It was 1959, and when he was 77, before Éamon de Valera was at last prevailed upon to quit as Ireland’s Taoiseach. On his last day in office his private secretary was startled to find him in tears, clutching the controls of the elaborate telephone on his desk.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s awfully hard to leave the levers of power…’