The SNP is split and unfocused, a collection of egos locked in a bitter war of attrition
JUST a month ago, Alex Salmond accused senior SNP figures of participating in a ‘malicious and concerted' attempt to drive him out of public life. In a submission to the Holyrood committee investigating the Government's handling of allegations against him, the former First Minister cast himself as the unwilling leading man in a grotesque conspiracy thriller.
Among those he pointed a finger at were SNP chief executive Peter Murrell and a senior political adviser, Liz Lloyd – who happen to be Nicola Sturgeon's husband and her chief of staff.
Lest she feel left out, Mr Salmond alleged Ms Sturgeon had broken the Ministerial Code during her handling of the matter.
A month on from this remarkable escalation in the brutal political war between the current First Minister and her one-time mentor, Mr Salmond wishes us to believe that he and Ms Sturgeon could work together to bring about independence.
Announcing his plan to stand for election in May as leader of the new Alba Party, Mr Salmond said it was his intention to help achieve a nationalist ‘super-majority' at Holyrood.
We are, it seems, to imagine that he and Ms Sturgeon might once more become allies in a political project and forget that these former friends have spent the past two years engaged in a conflict, with each making dark claims about the motives of the other.
If anyone believes a Salmond-Sturgeon alliance might rise from the ashes of the nationalist wars, then I've a bridge to sell them.
But, then, it's highly unlikely that even Mr Salmond believes in that particular happy ending. Rather, his decision to stand for election reads not as an attempt to help win independence but as an act of vengeance against a woman he believes betrayed him.
When Mr Salmond stepped in to the SNP leadership contest in 2004, he did so not because he yearned to run the party for a second time but because Ms Sturgeon, his favoured candidate to succeed John Swinney, was on course to lose.
Horrified by the prospect of his protégée's defeat, he offered her a deal – they would unite on a joint ticket, with him standing as leader while she would bid to be elected as his deputy.
And so began an extraordinarily successful partnership that saw the SNP win the 2007 Holyrood election then build upon that victory to deliver, in 2014, a referendum on independence.
When Mr Salmond then stepped down as leader, Ms Sturgeon was the sole candidate to replace him.
Her party might not have loved her enough in 2004 to give her the job but, a decade later, she was adored. Where Mr Salmond had failed, she would succeed, they reckoned. Under her leadership it would be a matter of when, rather than if, independence was won.
The new First Minister did nothing to disabuse them of this notion. Time and again in the following years she promised her followers that another referendum – which they would surely win – was within grasp. But time and again she failed to deliver that referendum.
Meanwhile, Mr Salmond and his allies began sniping from the sidelines. Ms Sturgeon was too ‘feart' they said, too willing to play the game by Westminster's rules. Mr Salmond, who had once been the driving force in the SNP's gradualist movement, the faction of the party that believed independence would be achieved slowly and steadily and only through a referendum agreed with the UK Government, became an icon for the fundamentalists, those nationalists who supported a different, more radical approach.
SNP members who favoured an illegal referendum without the cooperation of the UK Government or using an election result as the basis to begin talks on a break-up now saw him as their best hope.
So the ways in which Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon are divided are many and varied.
Not only is she furious about his behaviour while First Minister and he furious about what he sees as her disloyalty, they now fundamentally disagree about how independence might be achieved.
Ms Sturgeon will have hoped the election would mark a new start for her and her party.
Having survived an investigation which found that she did not, as Mr Salmond alleged, break the Ministerial Code, she will have been looking forward to a break with the enmity of the recent past.
Instead she finds herself in an election campaign against a sworn enemy whose objective is to take votes from her party.
Rather than being free to focus her attention on her unionist opponents, the First Minister will be fighting a constant rearguard action against Mr Salmond.
And if – as is entirely possible – Mr Salmond is elected to Holyrood, Ms Sturgeon's woes will deepen.
She will never get free of the SNP's failings over the allegations levelled against her predecessor while he sits in the same parliament, undermining her.
Mr Salmond will support Ms Sturgeon as a noose supports a hanged man. He will offer to work with her, fully aware that if she were to agree to any kind of pact, she would be exposing herself as a hypocrite.
How, after all, if she thinks him unfit to be an elected politician, could she work with him? But, equally, how could she not?
As a committed separatist, Ms Sturgeon wants all the support she can get for her plan to break up the United Kingdom. How could she distance herself from supportive votes from Mr Salmond?
The SNP's great electoral success of recent years was based on a
Former friends have spent two years in a brutal conflict with dark claims
Salmond will support Sturgeon as a noose supports a hanged man
remarkable display of unity. Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon instilled discipline in their party that made opponents green with envy.
Using SNP money and spin, they created the illusion of a huge grassroots Yes movement united in optimistic pursuit of their objective of wrenching Scotland out of the UK.
That fantasy is in tatters now. The nationalist movement is split and unfocused, with its key players engaged in a damaging attritional battle. Mr Salmond wishes to return to Holyrood not to aid Ms Sturgeon but to vindicate himself.
His fragile ego requires stoking and if, in the process, he does irreparable damage to the party and the movement he once led, then that is a price he is more than willing to pay. Who knows? Perhaps he even dreams that, one day, he might return to the SNP as leader for a third time.
That's entirely unlikely, of course, but the Salmond ego does not always take account of reality.
Unionist politicians greeted the news of Mr Salmond's decision to stand for election in May with questions about his fitness to serve as an MSP.
A key part of his defence in last year's court case which saw him cleared of a number of sexual offences was that he could have been a better man and that his behaviour had not always been appropriate and concerns about his return to the Scottish parliament are legitimate.
But on purely political grounds, those opposition leaders might privately rather like the idea of Mr Salmond back in Holyrood because if he achieves his ambition, the person whose career he's most likely to damage is Nicola Sturgeon's.