So have we finally seen the last of Mr Salmond and his bonnets?

SINCE last week’s local elections, much of the fallout has centred on the punishment meted out to Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives.

I’d suggest that the Scottish electorate was far more brutal in its treatment of someone else. You may possibly remember him: a chap by the name of Alex Salmond.

Last week, his Alba party was humiliated. When it emerged on the scene, offering red meat to hardcore Scottish nationalists, some observers (including, I admit, me) felt it might secure substantial support. We got that one wrong.

Mr Salmond’s deep unpopularity among Scottish voters has ruined his party’s chances. Pro-independence voters disillusioned with the SNP have instead turned to the Greens.

Last week, not a single one of Alba’s 111 candidates won a council seat.

The embarrassment was summed up by the now former Alba councillor for Inverclyde West, Chris McEleney who lost his seat after gaining only 125 first preference votes.

As he departed, he repeated Mr Salmond’s election night speech in the 2017 general election when the former SNP leader was beaten by the Conservatives.

When you’re repeating your leader’s losing speeches, it may be a sign that things aren’t quite going to plan.

Perhaps Alba still has a future but not with Mr Salmond at the helm. It may be time to conclude that, finally, we have seen the last of his bonnets and him.

If this is really it for Mr Salmond, it marks a major moment in Scotland’s political life. Yet, remarkably these days, he is barely noticed.

Cleared of attempted rape and sexual assault in court in 2020, he nevertheless departed with his reputation battered.

It seems that, as one, Scotland, has decided that the period between 2004 and 2014 when he was the most influential and popular politician of the post-devolution era, and came within a few hundred thousand votes of ending the United Kingdom, is best just forgotten about, an error of judgment we’d all rather no longer discuss.

Certainly that’s the SNP view. As in Maoist China, where errant cronies of the Chairman were erased from official depictions of the revolution, Mr Salmond has been expunged from the party’s history.

And yet all of them – Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney, Angus Robertson, the whole lot – owe Mr Salmond their political careers.

Had he not rescued the SNP from fast approaching oblivion in 2004, when he returned to take over the party, they would never have enjoyed such success.

Retirement

Nowadays, if their former leader was to confirm his retirement this week, I doubt any of them would summon so much as a tweet.

What a shower. If indeed Mr Salmond’s career is now finally over, I think the SNP and the country as a whole would benefit from analysing its old love affair with him a little more.

For all that Mr Salmond may now be persona non grata, none of that should distract us from the fact he was, in his day, a political genius. He could charm, cajole and threaten – and he knew exactly when to do which.

He drove his opponents round the bend. His charisma sucked oxygen out of every room he walked into.

His career showed how just one dominant political personality can carry so much before it. That our culture was so susceptible to the charms of such a leader is one thing we might do well to reflect on.

Mr Salmond’s career also taught us much about the nature of Scotland’s nationalist culture. He was smart enough to see that just yelling for freedom was never going to get him anywhere; not in cautious, canny Scotland.

He realised he needed to play a longer-term game – putting rocks in the stream in the hope of building a bridge to independence.

He did this first by supporting a devolved Scottish parliament, against the wishes of much of his party. Then, when he won power in 2007, he did it by downplaying independence and instead focusing on running the devolved government competently.

This gradualist approach was remarkably successful. It turned out that a Nationalist administration which didn’t bang on too much about independence was precisely what many Scots wanted. Ironically, it also ended his career.

In 2011, Mr Salmond’s strategy was so successful it led to him winning an unprecedented majority at Holyrood. That triggered a referendum. In retrospect, it was all way too soon. The SNP lost. Mr Salmond had to resign.

How much of Mr Salmond’s legacy lives on? For all that he has become a non-person within the SNP, his influence is still strong: witness the fact that Nicola Sturgeon still can’t shake that irritating mid-word chuckle, nor that reflexive mini Salmond headbutt which she uses to force home a political point.

In more substantial ways too, he lives on in his successor. After taking over from him in 2014, she continued to follow Mr Salmond’s gradualist approach – until Brexit came along. Like Mr Salmond, she appears to believe similarly in the idea of the alldominant leader, the human embodiment of the nation.

The trouble for the SNP is that the strands that made Mr Salmond such a success are coming apart.

As Mr Salmond gleefully likes to remind people, the SNP’s reputation for competence which his government earned is beginning to fray, as the fiasco over the delayed ferries is showing.

On the big ticket items of health, education and the economy, Miss Sturgeon’s Government looks less like an administration which is forging a new path, than one focused on defending its dismal record.

Aftermath

Meanwhile, on independence, it increasingly feels as though she has run out of road. The aftermath of the pandemic, war in Europe and a looming cost of living crisis occupy our waking thoughts.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of Scots therefore oppose a referendum next year. Everyone knows it’s not going to happen. Yet on Miss Sturgeon ploughs, insisting it will, seemingly convinced she can bend public opinion to her will.

A smarter SNP government, like the one Mr Salmond led after 2007, would now implement a reset.

It would accept that Indyref 2 is off the agenda for the next few years. It would focus instead of growing the Scottish economy.

It would talk of getting Scotland ‘indy-ready’. It would show it is serious about changing the country in the here and now, and demonstrate its competence.

Instead, the nationalist movement finds itself on the wrong side of public opinion. And so does Mr Salmond.

All political careers end in failure, the cliché has it. He may have beaten the odds many times, but after last week’s abject performance, it now seems we can finally add the name of Alex Salmond to that list.