'A true political giant': Martin Hannan's obituary of Alex Salmond

He was born on Hogmanay, 1954, in his parents’ house at Preston Road, Linlithgow, the second child of Robert Fyfe Findlay Salmond and his wife Mary née Milne. He had an elder sister Margaret, and younger siblings Gail – as Gail Hendry she would stand unsuccessfully for election to the Scottish Parliament – and Robert.

Salmond was afflicted with bouts of asthma as a child, and recalled many years later that he would spend long hours in his bed in their council house reading through a set of encyclopaedias bought for him by his father.

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Robert Salmond was an electrician in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and survived the torpedoing of aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable in the Mediterranean. He carried on his trade after demobbing, but later became a civil servant known locally for his work in securing pensions for ex-miners.

Salmond’s mother Mary, who was also a civil servant, encouraged her son’s singing and while attending Linlithgow Primary School he became a boy soprano in the choir at St Michael’s Parish Church in the town.

Despite his asthma, Salmond was a keen footballer and later said his boyhood ambition was to play for Hearts, the Tynecastle club of which he was a devoted follower all his life. Introduced to the sport by his father, he also became a keen golfer, a hobby that also became a life-long pursuit.

After attending Linlithgow Academy he went to Edinburgh College of Commerce where he gained an HNC in Business Studies. He matriculated at St Andrews University in 1973 to study Economics and Medieval History – his interest in Scottish history developed there and remained with him all his life.

St Andrews University, where Alex Salmond studiedIt was shortly after he arrived at St Andrews that at the age of 19 or 20, he joined the Scottish National Party, apparently doing so after an argument about Scottish politics with his then girlfriend Debbie Horton, the secretary of the student Labour Club.

Salmond never denied the story that his row with Horton ended with him being told that if he felt the way he did he should join the SNP.

That year saw the SNP win 11 Parliamentary seats in the October general election, and Salmond could see that, having taken 30% of the popular vote, the party was on the rise. He and the only other paid up party member at the university took over the Federation of Nationalist Students and that gave him access to the party’s leadership.

He was also active in student politics, becoming vice-president of the Students Representative Council and it was in that sphere that he honed his oratory and formidable debating skills which were soon noted by the SNP.

Salmond graduated with an MA joint honours degree in May 1978, and after an unsuccessful attempt to gain a reporting job with the BBC he joined the civil service as an assistant economist in the-then Department of Agriculture and Fisheries within the Scottish Office.

It was there he worked for Moira McGlashan from Peebles, who was 17 years his senior. The couple married in 1981, by which time Salmond had joined the Royal Bank of Scotland where he rose to the position of oil economist from 1982 onwards.

Former first minister Alex Salmond passed away over the weekendThe debacle of the 1979 devolution referendum which was democratically won but procedurally lost thanks to the Labour Party, followed by the SNP’s loss of nine seats overall in the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, convinced Salmond and several party colleagues that the SNP should switch to the left and they formed the 79 Group. SNP leader Gordon Wilson then forced a change in the party’s rules that forbade the formation of a “party within the party”.

In 1982 the party’s ruling council expelled Salmond and the rest of the 79 Group, but after a deal negotiated between Wilson and Salmond, the 79 Group were allowed back in. By 1985 his work for RBS had gained him experience in writing and broadcasting and that year saw him become the SNP’s vice-convener for publicity, a role in which he excelled.

Though he had no major connection to the constituency, despite visiting it often in his oil economist role, Salmond decided to stand for election to the House of Commons in Banff and Buchan in the general election of June 1987.

The previous SNP candidate, Douglas Henderson, had run the Tory candidate Albert McQuarrie close in 1983 after having previously been the MP for the constituency. Salmond, who shared Henderson’s oratorical skill, duly ousted McQuarrie in a seat he would go on to represent for 23 years. Salmond first came to prominence on a UK basis when he launched a protest against the Poll Tax during the Budget speech. By tradition that speech is never interrupted and Salmond was duly banned from the Commons for a week.

When Gordon Wilson stood down as SNP leader in 1990, it seemed virtually certain that he would be replaced by Margaret Ewing, but Salmond had been deputy leader of the party and decided to run, even though he and Ewing were both seen as representing the party’s left.

Margaret Ewing and Alex Salmond in 1992 (Image: Archive) He comfortably defeated Ewing in the election by members and promptly embarked on a process of making the SNP a more professional party. He was never boringly managerial, however. He had a life-long love of horse racing and in the 1990s was persuaded to write a column on the sport in The Herald and then The Scotsman.

He frequently tipped horses to win, and he also backed his tips, which made him popular with the bookmakers as he would admit that while he loved a flutter, he never made a fortune from his gambling.

Salmond was an assiduous constituency MP, as shown by his regularly polling more than 50% of the votes. In 1997, the fishing boat Sapphire sank in the North Sea with the four crew members’ bodies trapped on the sunken vessel. Using all his formidable campaigning skills, Salmond joined their families in successfully calling for the boat to be raised and the bodies recovered for burial.

Twenty years later he said: “If I go to the Pearly Gates and my maker says, ‘What did you ever do with your life as an MP and all the rest of it?’ I might well say, ‘I helped raise the Sapphire’.”

The opinion polls slowly began to turn the SNP’s way and though the party’s share of the vote increased in the 1992 General Election it wasn’t until the 1997 election that brought Tony Blair and Labour to power that the SNP won six seats in that year’s election.

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By that time he had already made the decision which, above all, led him to becoming an important leader for Scotland. The SNP had never been committed fully to a gradualist approach to independence via devolution, but Salmond argued the case for a devolved assembly and in the 1997 referendum he was one of the driving forces in the campaign that won the two votes for devolution – and this time there was no Labour wrecking amendment.

In the Scottish Parliamentary election in 1999, Salmond was elected MSP for Banff and Buchan and led the SNP as the main opposition in the reconvened Scottish Parliament with its Labour-Liberal coalition.

That year also saw Salmond cause huge controversy when he described Nato action in Kosovo as “an act of dubious legality, but, above all, one of unpardonable folly”. Salmond would later also cause a huge row when he denounced prime minister Tony Blair’s decision to join the US in attacking Iraq.

After a decade in the post, Salmond quit as SNP leader but his replacement, John Swinney, was never popular and in 2004 he stepped down. After what he called “a change of mind” Salmond stood on a joint ticket with his protégée Nicola Sturgeon and won the leadership back again.

In the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary election, he won the Gordon seat as the SNP became the largest party with Labour a single seat behind. Though some in the party had their doubts, Salmond decided to go for a minority administration with Sturgeon as his deputy first minister in Holyrood. He was the first nationalist to be elected first minister.

(Image: SNS) He had to deal with the terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport, memorably saying: “Terrorist acts are the work of individuals not communities and the arrival of terror on our soil must not result in racist attacks on ethnic minorities whose only crime is to share the same religion and colour as the bombers.”

Salmond exuded confidence and charisma. In private he was noted for his humour and his ability to bring people into the conversation. His term as first minister brought the SNP unprecedented success when in the 2011 election the party won an outright majority in Holyrood which Labour’s Scotland Act had supposedly made impossible.

Armed with that success, Salmond met prime minister David Cameron who had already decided the vote for independence would be against it. How wrong he nearly was, with Salmond leading the Yes campaign from under 30% to over 45% on polling day.

In order to spare the Yes side from a likely blood-letting, Salmond decided to stand down the day after the referendum was lost. He would later say that decision was a mistake.

He said: “My time as leader is nearly over, but for Scotland, the campaign continues and the dream shall never die.” Those last five words became the title of his memoir of the referendum campaign.

He returned to Westminster as MP for Gordon in the 2015 SNP landslide election, but lost the seat two years later. Having signed to do a weekly show with the Kremlin-backed Russia Today TV channel, Salmond faced fierce criticism from inside the Scottish Parliament, with Nicola Sturgeon expressing her regrets at his move.

He insisted there was editorial freedom for the show, which he suspended when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

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In August 2018, a leak from within the Scottish Government allowed the Daily Record to claim that Salmond was under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct dating back to 2013. Salmond was able to prove in the Court of Session that the inquiry into his conduct was “tainted with bias” and he was awarded more than £500,000 in legal costs.

A police inquiry ended with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service bringing sexual misconduct charges, including attempted rape, against Salmond who denied all the charges.

He told the press: ”I am no saint but I am not guilty of what I have been accused of.”

The trial at the High Court in Edinburgh ended with Salmond being acquitted of all charges, but his reputation was besmirched. As the Covid-19 pandemic had just begun, Salmond withdrew from public life. He re-emerged in podcasts produced by Slainte Media which he had set up with co-producer Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and a new version of the televised Alex Salmond Show was being broadcast by a Turkish-based channel.

He was still in demand to speak at international political events and it was while attending one of them in North Macedonia that he collapsed and died. The cause of his death is suspected to be a massive heart attack. Details of his funeral and memorial services will be released in due course. They are sure to be events of national and indeed international significance.

Alex Salmond had no children and is survived by Moira and his siblings.

History will make its judgement of Salmond, but there can be no doubt that he was a formidable and inspirational figure whose life-long passion for Scotland and its independence will likely never be surpassed.