Court of public opinion delivers damning verdict
Dream of comeback in tatters as Salmond’s new party fails to win a seat
ON the occasion of his last election defeat in 2017 he warned that we had not seen the last of him. Alex Salmond was as good as his word. His story was by no means finished.
He returned with a TV show bankrolled by the Kremlin. He took the Scottish Government to court; in turn the Crown took him to court on an attempted rape charge and multiple counts of sexual assault.
On his acquittal, there was a starring role in a Holyrood inquiry in which he accused former SNP colleagues of plotting to have him jailed. It nearly ended the career of his successor as First Minister.
And, at the conclusion of the bloodletting, there was another tilt at elected office, this time as party leader of a new outfit – gutsier, more impatient than the one he spent decades transforming from sideshow to dominant political force.
All told, then, an eventful four years for the totemic figure of Scottish Nationalism who, until that humiliating count in Aberdeen in 2017, had won every electoral seat he had ever stood for. That record went all the way back to 1987, when Nicola Sturgeon was still a schoolgirl.
This weekend Scottish voters – those inscrutable pencil-wielders that Salmond once held in the palm of his hand – delivered their verdict on those four years.
If 2017 was humiliating, 2021 was absolutely crushing. Perched alone at a table peppered with discarded soft drinks bottles, Salmond stared miserably at his phone, surely recognising that it was over.
He used to run the country, you know. Back in 2011, voters rewarded his debut term as First Minister with an overall majority for the SNP. Yes, the party he led was so popular it actually broke an electoral system designed to encourage coalitions and the politics of consensus.
Three years after that, the independence movement he spearheaded edged ahead in the polls, with just weeks to go before the 2014 referendum. Had the polls remained that way Scotland would be ‘free’, the UK over and Salmond’s legacy set in granite for hundreds of years to come.
Yet there he sat, wretched, an overnight political irrelevance. His Alba Party had scraped just 1.7 per cent of the regional vote across Scotland – barely a fifth of the Greens’ total. They were not even significant enough to be termed a sideshow. The man who once stood for elections expecting to be returned as First Minister had fallen woefully short of the figures needed even to sneak in as a list MSP.
FOR an ego-driven, alpha male politician, it is the most excruciating of electoral annihilations. It will smart all the more for the fact that no one in Holyrood will be happier about it than his former deputy and protégée Nicola Sturgeon.
The scale of the defeat is a bitter lesson, too, for many in the SNP, a party which for years was characterised in terms of its Sturgeon-ite and Salmond-ite fault line.
Kenny MacAskill, the former justice secretary, tore up his SNP membership to join Salmond’s Alba Party. MP Neale Hanvey also switched allegiance to Alba and former MPs George Kerevan and Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh did the same. Their gamble was based on the presumption that Salmond’s powerbase remained substantial.
Indeed, long after he lost his Westminster seat in 2017, the belief that he remained the biggest figure in the SNP persisted – even when he resigned from it.
His 2018 crowd-funding appeal for £50,000 to pay legal fees to challenge the Scottish Government over its handling of sexual harassment claims against him reached its target in four hours. It went on to raise more than twice that much. As a senior member of the independence ‘Alex’s resignation movement does nothing put it: to remove his power base within the party and the very quick response to his crowdfunding clearly illustrates that is the case. He may no longer be formally a member of the SNP, but I think most SNP members will still see him as the chief member of the SNP.’
Less than three years later, that powerbase has evaporated; those ‘personal’ votes on which Salmond once counted now slip through his fingers like sand. In common with many of the most dramatic political downfalls, his was entirely of his own making.
March He may last have year of been attempting cleared to in rape one party colleague and sexually harassing several other party workers and civil servants, but the stain the trial left on his character was indelible. That infamous ‘sleepy cuddle’ which he admitted having – and apologising for – with a staff member while he was First Minister plagued Alba’s failed election campaign.
And, throughout the trial, ran the thread of an unreconstructed male invading the personal space of females who were not his wife. Equally damning, perhaps, was his successor’s most public rejection of a man she admitted that, next to her husband and parents, she had loved. If the First Minister who owed her career to this giant of nationalism now openly bristled at his attempt to return to elected office, what were voters to think?
Might there be more than a smidgen of truth in the widely rehearsed SNP view that Alba was rather less about securing a supermajority for independence-supporting parties than propelling Salmond back into Holyrood to settle scores and bathe once more in the political spotlight?
WHAT is undeniably true is that, in the feud that raged ever more overtly between the former leader and the current one, there has proved to be only one winner, and her victory is more emphatic than either surely imagined.
As recently as February the First Minister was giving serious consideration to resigning. Her former boss was coming for her and she, more than anyone, understood the damage he was capable of inflicting when riled and indignant. Many times when his power was greater than hers she had witnessed the explosive Salmond temper and, doubtless, offered silent thanks to the gods that she was not the one on the receiving end of it. With the election looming, she stood in his cross-hairs.
That she did so and survived leaves her emboldened and him emasculated as a political force.
For now, he brushes off Alba’s non-performance. His party is just six weeks old and already has two MPs and 50,000 votes across Scotland, he says. Alba is ‘a political force with which to be reckoned’, a player on the political scene ‘and we intend to stay there’. But, as of this weekend, it is a player too minor for Holyrood representation, too footling to give the First Minister sleepless nights.
Back in 2017, in the same speech where Salmond promised we had ‘not seen the last of my bonnets and me’ he nursed wounded pride by pointing out he had fought ten elections and lost just this one – ‘not too bad a batting average,’ as he described it. He has now lost two in a row. In that general election another big SNP beast, the party’s Westminster leader Angus Robertson, lost his Moray seat. Like Salmond, he languished unelected for four years before returning to fight Edinburgh Central for Holyrood. Unlike Salmond, he romped home, wresting the seat from the Tories and amassing a near 5,000-vote majority.
THE yawning chasm separating their 2021 fortunes will not be lost on the former First Minister. Is the pre-eminent politician of his generation, then, finally a spent force? A clue may lie in the admission to one interviewer at the weekend that he remains only ‘interim’ leader of Alba.
Who leads the party permanently will ‘depend on’ its June conference, he said. The unpalatable truth which Salmond may have to swallow is he could be, in the twilight of a career of extraordinary successes, more of a liability for Alba than a talisman. Similarly, his SNP defector comrades have serious thinking to do. Did they jump ship too early? Without Salmond as their figurehead, do they even have a party at all?
‘All political lives, 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.’ Salmond, the ultimate political anorak, will know those Enoch Powell words well.
Yet Salmond, also the ultimate political gambler, backed himself to disprove them. He lost.
‘ For an ego-driven politician, it’s the most excruciating of electoral annihilations