Alex Salmond's death marks the end of a chapter

With the deaths of Darling and Salmond, the 'once in a generation' argument is losing traction

The Scottish Parliament at night, image Rob Bruce

Alex Salmond's last years were marred by allegations of sexual harassment and his decision to host a chat show on Russia’s state broadcaster. But in the decades before that, he played a leading role in the independence movement and the development of the Scottish Parliament. 

Under his leadership, the SNP moved from opposing devolution to supporting it, and the referendum of 1997 delivered a unified ‘Yes’ from 75% of Scots. We forget now what a moment that was. There had been a century or more of struggle for Home Rule.  A narrow ‘Yes’ for a Scottish Parliament in a referendum in 1979 had been ignored.  Through the long Thatcher and Major years Scotland had painful things done to it by a government it did not elect. There was huge excitement about what Billy Connolly ruefully called ‘a pretendy wee Parliament’.

In the late 90s, when Salmond was the SNP leader at Westminster and my late father Arnold Kemp was working at the Observer, I remember hearing that Salmond would sometimes make his way to the Coach and Horses where the journalists would retire after the paper had been put to bed on a Saturday night, to consult with Arnold. If Arnold wasn’t there he would look terribly disappointed. 

Arnold was passionately in favour of a Scottish Parliament and just got to see its inception before he died at the age of 63, in a similar way to Salmond, from a massive heart attack while abroad. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life  - that phone call still haunts me - so I have huge sympathy for Salmond’s wife Moira and his wider family. 

Salmond’s passing marks the closing of a chapter - but the story of Scotland’s struggle for independence continues. 

Overstepping the mark

Despite the claims and counter-claims over the court case, it’s clear that at some point in his long career, Salmond began to overstep the mark with women. My friend and collaborator, the journalist Vicky Allan has written about the time she met him for an interview and he kissed her on the lips.

In the Herald in 2018, Allan wrote: ​​”This world, where it’s conceivable that a political giant like Alex Salmond could fall over such allegations, true or not, is different to the one I reflected in 2015, when I casually described an interview meeting with Salmond in which he unexpectedly greeted me with a friendly kiss on the lips. The tone has changed – transformed by #MeToo.” At the time she described it as ‘disconcerting’. 

Did the way Salmond was lionised by the independence movement, roughly from 2007 on, contribute to his sense that he could get away with that kind of behaviour?  Perhaps, like many famous men, he found he had acquired a celebrity he could misuse.  The allegations against him seem to date from these later years. 

Salmond should have known better - but people across the senior levels of the organisation were at fault too. Salmond’s 2020 trial opened a window on some pretty questionable working practices at Bute House - young members of staff left alone late at night with the boss in a home-style environment where drink had been taken. In the atmosphere of “wheesht for indy” before the referendum, complaints were brushed under the carpet. 

It is not to excuse Salmond to say that there was an issue with the party’s organisation and culture. Salmond admitted that he had made errors of judgement - he was not alone. He should have been warned about his behaviour and disciplinary procedures instituted. As a much younger man, Salmond was expelled from the SNP by Gordon Wilson. I once asked Gordon why he did this and he said it was because of a lack of discipline. Anyone who read Vicky’’s piece knew enough to have taken Eck aside and told him to watch his step. 

Working with Russian TV

Salmond’s first fall from grace came in 2017 when, after he unexpectedly lost his Westminster seat at the General Election, he started a political chat show on Russia Today. It’s pure speculation, but I always wondered if he was short of money. He had a gambling habit and after losing his job and salary overnight, he would have lost the crucial ability to service debt. 

I don’t suppose there were many offers on the table for him from London broadcasters. Scotland’s media industry is a fraction of the size of that of similar-sized independent countries and mostly controlled from an indifferent England. Pickings are slim. Salmond would not have been able to call in anything like the kind of sums Boris Johnson gets for his inconsequential witterings in the Daily Mail. Whatever the reason, Salmond’s acceptance of the offer was an embarrassment to the SNP and the wider independence movement. Former colleagues started to distance themselves from him at this point. 

Delivering the indy ref

Looking beyond the shame and scandal of Salmond’s last years, though, he will be forever credited with delivering the first independence referendum for Scotland. The agreement Salmond made with David Cameron was a direct result of the SNP’s 2011 victory, when they gained an absolute majority in a Holyrood election that was designed to deliver coalitions. 

That 2011 election result was in part a result of luck because the pattern of support meant that the SNP picked up seats on the regional lists in some areas and will probably never be replicated. It also stemmed from the success of the 2007 minority administration Salmond led, with support from the Scottish Conservatives under Annabel Goldie.

But the argument that the odds are very much stacked against big parties like the SNP when it comes to Holyrood’s list seats has merit and that is the reason why the Alba party that Salmond founded in 2021 probably has a place. The Scottish independence movement encompasses both socially conservative and progressive voices and it makes sense that they should be able to vote for smaller parties in a proportionally representative parliament.

The indy ref piece was already on the board

2011 wasn’t the first time Scotland had seriously considered a referendum on independence, In 2007, the then Labour leader Wendy Alexander shocked her party by saying they should support one. Part of her calculation may have been that it would be a good idea to get the inevitable out of the way sooner rather than later, against a background trend of growing support for Scottish independence.  Alexander also believed that Scottish Labour would benefit from what she saw as the inevitable “No” vote. History didn’t exactly turn out like that.

The aftermath of 2014 was a new beginning

The 2014 referendum was lost of course but it came much closer to swinging towards ‘yes” than anyone would have believed possible just a couple of years earlier. I remember questioning Salmond at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2013 about what the day after defeat would look like. He shrugged off the question, answering that he was hoping for victory but if that was not the outcome, he was prepared. He said something like -  “I have lost loads of elections”.

And the day after the vote, Salmond seemed to be the first on the losing side to lift his head and sniff the wind when Cameron came out of Downing Street and, instead of thanking Gordon Brown, announced he was demoting Scotland’s Westminster MPs under EVEL. It was the start of a new campaign for the SNP, which had an extraordinary result in the 2015 General Election, winning 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

Holyrood’s powers increased after the 2014 referendum

On the eve of the referendum, when polls were suggesting Yes could actually win, Brown famously made a vow to increase the powers of the Scottish Parliament - saying that Scots could have the middle way of a strong Parliament in a federal-style UK. Holyrood did subsequently get greater fiscal powers, including the ability to set tax bands. It lacks many important levers - over energy, immigration and trade for example and it was forced to swallow a Brexit it didn’t choose - but the Scottish Parliament now controls more than half of the public money spent in Scotland.  So the referendum ended up increasing the powers of Holyrood in significant ways. 

That bit of progress would not have been lost on Salmond, however much he denounced it as falling short. He was a pragmatist who saw independence as something that was not all or nothing but could take different forms - at one point he seemed to envisage a kind of semi-detached Scotland which shared the pound, the Royal Family, and defence with the UK.  

That grandmother’s footsteps approach to independence has been tried elsewhere. In 1918, Iceland and Denmark agreed a 25-year extension to their Union with a break clause. 

Once in a generation?

The two big beasts who debated the pros and cons of Scottish independence in 2014, Alistair Darling and Alex Salmond are both gone now. The argument that an independence referendum should be held only once in a generation is starting to lose its force. 

There will undoubtedly be another referendum at some point. For the Unionist side, telling Scotland that it cannot hold a democratic vote on the constitutional question is not sustainable and is likely to prove counterproductive.