‘IHAD no idea that my life was so dull’ remarked Alex Salmond on reading a biography of himself written with much labour and even greater Toryism.
The medium was part of his message, lighting up his own sense of humour and his biographer’s lack of it. He made humour perhaps his most formidable and instructive tactic in fulfilling his major strategies. His biographer showed little humour. Few politicians do.
Salmond, here as elsewhere, was among the exceptions, in educational wit comparable to Benjamin Disraeli, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Michael Foot, and Conor Cruise O’Brien. He was trained as an economist, developed a love of history, and taught by conviction and laughter. To most politicians a cliché is a lifebelt; to him its dissection enlightened his hearers.
In a characteristic explosion of Unionist post-2016 international policy, he captured its irrelevance and antipathy for Scotland by labelling its menu “the full English Brexit”.
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As Scotland’s first minister he comprehended Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Irish and North American politics. His quarter-century in the House of Commons made him one of its surest performers, ready to encourage opponents showing constructive potential, learning Westminster’s weaknesses and strengths from history. The high ground of the Commons had been held and transformed by Irishmen such as Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, and Welshmen such as David Lloyd George, whom Salmond studied to such effect that he was summoned to lecture on Parnell in his birthplace at Avondale, Co Wicklow.
It was true of him as it was of them that he made his country’s people walk taller. But he also helped civilise the House of Commons.
On an official visit to Northern Ireland he was asked how well he as Scotland’s first minister worked with Gordon Brown, and said quite well, since both of them wanted to do their best for Scotland, although not agreeing as to Scotland’s ultimate destination.
He added that in Northern Ireland the first minister (then Revd Dr Ian Paisley, a Democratic Unionist) and the deputy first minister (Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein) were working together although not in agreement as to Northern Ireland’s ultimate destination, but he felt it would be as well to say nothing further on ultimate destinations in the presence of so eminent a theological authority as Dr Paisley.
He must have been the only head of government to joke about Ian Paisley’s much-trumpeted religious adhesion, to his face, winning a wide smile for it.
Among his contemporaries he ranks with Neil MacCormick, Stephen Maxwell and Tom Nairn, while declaring each to be a better man than himself. He shared in their varying forms of internationalism, believing with MacDiarmid that Scottish nationalism should displace the parochialism of mere shadow imitation of the English Home Counties which blocked Scotland’s view of the world.
He followed up Winnie Ewing’s Europeanisation of Scottish politics through her use of the European Parliament for the educational and economic betterment of Scotland as colleague, not rival, of our fellow Europeans. In the European community In Europe, his leadership for Scottish independence and his party’s opposition to Brexit chimed admirably with the European community’s insistence on regional autonomy, as his obituarists in the European media are remembering today.
He built on the Scottish nationalist tradition of constitutional agitation and invocation of the non-violent leadership of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He courageously opposed participation in all violence, however electorally inopportune.
During Nato’s intervention in the Yugoslav wars he protested against the bombing of Serbia. At that time, speaking to me with horror at the destruction of a hospital his eyes filled with tears.
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His TV obituarists have called this “divisive”, characteristic of the semantic floundering his courage prompted. His life-long demand for Scottish emancipation from the UK and the UK’s archaic lumber was perpetually denounced as divisive and worse.
His hopes for rebuilding Scottish nationalism with best possible collaboration in the cause of independence would never include acceptance of violent means.
Time and again he showed that Scottish nationalism must save the Scots from the injustices with which the English oppress themselves, such as prescription charges, university tuition fees and hostility to immigration. He kept firm against English political fashions such as intra-party witch-hunting, which temporarily – and illegally – led to expulsion of “the 79 Group”, headed by Stephen Maxwell and himself, from the SNP in 1981.
He made no profession of religion, but made use of religious quest for justice and peace, and deplored clerics’ attempts to prevent secular legislation in favour of same-sex marriage (which certainly did not include bullying individual religious ceremonies).
Salmond would have been amused as well as pleased by King Charles’s one-sentence tribute to him: “His devotion to Scotland drove his decades of public service.”
Tactically Alex Salmond knew the grammar and syntax of manoeuvre, strategically he kept independence permanently within his sights.
Salmond’s ideal of Scottish independence meant confidence in a country and its people. It meant that politics, and indeed democracy, were not luxuries to discard while politicians scored poll popularity points and voters slept.
Alex Salmond symbolised a Scotland half of whose voters want Scottish independence but which requires political integrity in its political advocates, not endless backbiting despite vindication of a leader whose greatest beneficiaries ratted on him to provide expensive feathers for their own nests.
To win independence, Scotland must cherish his memory and idealism.
Owen Dudley Edwards is an Irish historian and former reader in Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh
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