I will miss my friend Alex Salmond, a political titan full of mistakes

I will always remember the way he contributed to the quality of our political life

October 13, 2024 3:10 PM(Updated 3:11 PM)

Alex Salmond was a political force, the kind of person you would think could survive death.

I first interviewed him in 2008. The interview caused quite a firestorm because he committed the treasonous act of claiming that Margaret Thatcher wasn’t all bad. It was front page news in the Scottish media for days. He had only been Prime Minister for a year, but a few years later he told me he wondered whether that was why he should resign.

In 2015, after he lost the independence referendum and resigned as Scottish First Minister, Alex and I started hosting a weekly call on LBC. He absolutely loved it and was a natural. He loved taking aggressive callers and enjoyed bantering in the studio with me. The show went so well that LBC subsequently offered him his own show on Sunday afternoon. Somehow a solo show didn’t really work. He lacked someone to bounce back from, and the show only lasted six months.

Alex didn’t take it well, but he was not one to wallow in self-pity and within months he had set up his own production company, and started presenting a weekly politics and interview show on the much-criticized Russia Today, later RT. Frankly, I was shocked that he would tarnish his reputation in this way and I told him so in no uncertain terms.

He was unrepentant, although to his credit he pulled the show on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By then we had at least partially repaired relations when I contacted him after he was acquitted by the Scottish court on sexual harassment charges.

That lawsuit would have scared most people. He refused to be intimidated, but when the verdict came down he was dignified and calm and did not take any kind of victory lap.

He had been out of the political spotlight for some time when he decided to re-enter the political fray by founding a new pro-Scottish independence party, Alba. It generated far more publicity than votes and failed to achieve a political breakthrough. Without Alex at the helm, it’s hard to see how it can survive.

Salmond’s relationship with his former deputy and eventual successor as SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, had been on the rocks long before the sexual harassment trial.

The former best friends became the bitterest enemies. My suspicion is that both parties said things about each other that they later regretted. But there was no way back.

Nicola told me she didn’t believe their friendship could ever be rekindled, and she didn’t seem to want to either. I never quite believed that. Alex seemed more open to the prospect, but remained hypercritical of her until the end.

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Even his most bitter political enemies cannot deny that Alex Salmond was a titan of both Scottish and British politics. It was he who led the SNP into government, after decades of semi-irrelevance. It was he who was more eloquent than anyone else in putting forward the argument for independence. It was he who achieved the impossible and led the SNP to an overall majority in 2011. It was he who was prime minister for seven years and convinced a conservative prime minister to organize a referendum. It was a referendum in which he came closer to victory than most had predicted.

The last time I saw Alex was in May this year when we were both on the BBC panel Question Time in Aberdeen. Typically, Alex stole the show by showing up late and taking his seat on the panel after the taping had started. His first priority at the end of the show was to call his wife Moira. He handed me the phone and said, “Here, talk to your biggest fan. She loves your voice.” And Moira and I chatted for a few minutes as if we had known each other for years. And it is Moira who is most on my mind as I write this.

I can’t quite believe I’ll never see Alex again. I’ll never see that cheeky twinkle in his eye when he thinks of another way to turn me on. But I will always remember the way he contributed to the quality of our political life. He was the most brilliant debater. He was a great political strategist and an excellent interviewee. Every time I saw him he would treat me to a different aspect of his love for Scotland and its history, in which he was an expert.

Our body politic will miss all that. Scotland will miss all that.

For me it is very simple. I will miss my friend.