Calm, controlled and forensic, he sought to finish off his protegee, but it may well be voters who do the job

Anyone who has the slightest doubt that we are witnessing the gory end of a fairly spectacular political phenomenon, namely the double-act of Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, couldn’t have caught even the briefest of snatches of his icily frank performance at Holyrood.

It’s over, and so too must surely loom the end of the love affair that much of the Scottish electorate appears to have had with Ms Sturgeon during the last year. The diehards will stay, but how can she keep normally non-nationalist voters who defeated her in the 2014 referendum and who’ve been won over by her daily television appearances in the battle against the Covid? And the polls suggested they might back her in an election in two months’ time and in any subsequent referendum.

But yesterday Mr Salmond said she wasn’t fit to run an independent country and that she had, without doubt, broken the ministerial code about what they knew and when of allegations – which he denied – against him of sexual assault.

He did believe that it was up to an independent inquiry – not him – to decide whether she should resign. But he did rage against the fact that evidence that the Crown Office had initially said could be published they had subsequently said should be “unpublished”. This was an issue that he believes should lead the Lord Advocate to “consider his position”, in other words submit his resignation.

Mr Salmond said he had been the subject of a “witch hunt” by people close to the First Minister, including Peter Murrell, her husband, who had been contacting people to secure allegations against him. And after a judicial inquiry into an investigation by the Scottish Government had found in his favour – costing the taxpayer over £500,000 – a senior government special adviser had told a colleague: “We’ll get him in the criminal case.”

He said that the Scottish Government had delayed settling the judicial review, even when they knew they’d lose, in the hope that the criminal case against him “would ride to the rescue like the cavalry coming over the hill”.

In a display of all the forensic debating powers that once made him a power, not just in Scottish but UK politics, Mr Salmond sought to finish

He insisted he was being prevented from disclosing evidence ‘way beyond’ what he’d been allowed to reveal

his former protégée off as a political leader. He said that, in spite of all the bad publicity the country had suffered in recent days, “Scotland hasn’t failed; its leadership has failed.”

He said he wanted Scotland to be independent, but he also wanted it to be somewhere with robust safeguards where citizens were not subject to

“arbitrary authority”. Wearing an SNP tie and lapel badge – he’s not now a party member – he kept mostly calm and controlled as he went carefully through a catalogue of what he said was a campaign against him

Nobody should forget, as Ms Sturgeon will undoubtedly make plain when she gives evidence next week, that at the root of this incredible saga were allegations of sexual assault levelled against Mr Salmond – claims he denied – by two civil servants.

And when members of the committee sought to question him about this episode he twice repeated the same mantra – namely that two judges and one jury had cleared him.

He did urge the committee to get agreement to publish the censored evidence, but in relation to his main “target” yesterday – his successor as First Minister – Mr Salmond said that while he hadn’t made any allegations against others that he couldn’t corroborate, for that reason he hadn’t made any specific allegation against Ms Sturgeon. However, in what sounded like a threat, he insisted that he was being prevented from disclosing evidence “way beyond” what he’d so far been allowed to reveal.

The question at the end of all of this

Can voters say they retain confidence in her when a government is besmirching the good name of Scotland?

is, can voters really continue to say they retain confidence in Nicola Sturgeon when they understand what they’re backing is not simply a fractured personal relationship but a government that is besmirching, on the evidence we heard yesterday, not just the good name of important national institutions but of Scotland itself ?