Juggernaut of Joy

Salmond’s core characteristic, over and above his arrogance, his intelligence, and his temper, was a kind of ecstatic self-belief. Only half-jokingly, the columnist Pat Kane called him a human “juggernaut of joy.”

In 2007, Salmond hired the “positivity coach” and lifestyle psychologist Claire Howell to help convince his colleagues — Nicola Sturgeon, his successor in waiting, among them — that they were capable of winning the upcoming Scottish election. A few months later, the SNP clawed its way into power at Holyrood for the first time, beating the historically hegemonic Labour Party by a single seat.

It was at this point that Scottish nationalism moved from the fringes, where it had lingered with varying degrees of visibility since World War II, to the center of Scotland’s civic life. Salmond felt vindicated personally. From 1990 onward, his central political goal had been to break Labour’s stranglehold over the Scottish working classes. In an interview with Times Radio conducted shortly before his death, he defined the “holy grail” of constitutional politics as the blending of nationalist aims with the “bread-and-butter issues of social and economic progress.”

For Salmond, this approach conferred on the SNP three strategic responsibilities: 1 ) to govern competently at Holyrood and, in doing so, to show Scots that they were capable of governing themselves; 2 ) to grow the Scottish economy; and 3 ) to build a welfare firewall in Scotland that protected Scottish public services from the privatizing incursions of the Westminster parties.

The strategy worked. In 2011, the SNP won an unprecedented overall majority in the Scottish Parliament. In 2015, it completed a near-perfect sweep of Scotland’s urban and industrial Westminster constituencies — twentieth-century Labour heartlands.

A Modern Janus

Politically, Salmond was idiosyncratic: an antipodal mix of left-wing populist and Blairite neoliberal policies. In the 1970s, he studied medieval history and economics at the University of St Andrew’s. In the early 1980s, he joined the 79 Group, a socialist faction inside the SNP whose supporters were temporarily expelled from the party. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an oil economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

These contradictory influences framed Salmond’s thinking and followed him into office. As first minister, he used the limited powers of the Scottish Parliament to make university education free for Scottish students and scrap National Health Service (NHS) prescription charges. He also backed tax cuts for Scottish corporations, invoking the ideas of Arthur Laffer, and called for the lifting of Britain’s supposedly “gold-plated” financial controls.

Before the 2008 crash, Salmond, in a desperate bid to bolster the global prestige of Scottish institutions, endorsed RBS’s reckless acquisition of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. This was a key tipping point in Britain’s subsequent descent into financial disarray. Yet when the crash happened, he was the first leader in Britain to call for coordinated stimulus spending as an alternative to Westminster austerity.

Dreams and Disappointments

For a while following the SNP’s 2011 victory, Salmond looked unstoppable. But he wasn’t. In 2012, he cosigned the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron, establishing a “fair, legal, and decisive” framework for a referendum on independence. Two years later, that referendum took place, and Salmond lost.

In his referendum memoir, The Dream Shall Never Die — memorably described by one reviewer when it was published in 2015 as a “sneering oil slick of a book” — Salmond blamed the Yes campaign’s defeat on everyone (journalists, pollsters, civil servants, colleagues) but himself.

In reality, he had scuffed his pitch. An independent Scotland, Salmond said during the campaign, would expel Britain’s Clyde-based nuclear deterrent while joining NATO. It would keep the British pound but set its own spending rules. It would leave the United Kingdom but preserve the British crown.

Middle-class Scots, already unsettled by the prospect of constitutional change, however rigorously derisked, balked at what the SNP was offering. On September 19, 2014, the day after the referendum, Salmond resigned, and Sturgeon prepared to take over.

My final encounter with Salmond — I met him half a dozen times over the course of a decade — came eight months later, in the run-up to the 2015 UK general election. I was on assignment for the New Statesman. He was standing for a seat in the North East of Scotland and invited me to interview him at the BrewDog distillery in Ellon, Aberdeenshire. (He knew the owners.)

It was obvious, even then, that Sturgeon had cut him loose. When I asked what his day-to-day responsibilities were when it came to the SNP, the party he had spent two decades building, he had no answer. Instead, for thirty minutes, he told meandering anecdotes about his upbringing in Linlithgow. At the end of the interview, he handed me a signed copy of his memoir.

Salmond and Sturgeon

In her own memoir, Frankly, Sturgeon says that her relationship with Salmond began to deteriorate “the moment” she replaced him as leader in late 2014. “He was reportedly angry that I hadn’t found an important role for him,” she writes. “I was so busy that I didn’t pay it much attention.”

This was a mistake. A rift emerged. Salmond couldn’t tolerate the loss of first ministerial authority; Sturgeon — a woman, his protégé, sixteen years his junior — had locked him out of her inner circle.

The last nine years of Salmond’s life furnished one controversy after another: sexual assault claims, Kremlin-backed TV contracts, criminal charges, court acquittals, and splinter parties.

Salmond was charged with sexual assault in 2019 and acquitted in 2020. He later alleged, with zero evidence, that Sturgeon had engineered a Me Too conspiracy against him. (The claim acquired a gloss of credibility among online conspiracists after a botched Scottish government investigation resulted in Salmond being awarded £500,000 in legal damages.)

In 2017, Salmond, now out of parliament and off the political front lines, began hosting a talk show on Russia Today, a move that enraged the SNP’s pro-European leadership. In 2018, he quit the SNP. In 2021, he launched Alba, a nationalist breakaway party. Over time, his politics darkened.

When Sturgeon resigned as first minister in 2023, citing personal exhaustion, Salmond said she was “very good at winning elections” but had sabotaged her tenure by pursuing woke liberal obsessions like reform of the Gender Recognition Act. On another occasion, he called trans rights a “daft ideology imported from elsewhere.”

Salmond criticized Sturgeon over her coalition deal with the Scottish Greens, her opposition to ongoing oil and gas extraction from the North Sea, and — above all — her mangled attempts to rewrite the SNP’s independence road map.

Every public utterance seemed calculated to humiliate his successor. At a festival event in Edinburgh in 2017, Salmond joked that while he might have promised his audience an appearance from “either Theresa May or Nicola Sturgeon, Ruth Davidson or Melania Trump,” he “couldn’t make any of these wonderful women come.”

Salmond mitigated his diminished status in Scottish affairs with petty acts of passive aggression. Voters were repulsed. Alba went nowhere. By the time he died, he was the most unpopular politician in Britain.

Personifying the Cause

How, then, should Scotland remember this big, barreling, bully of a man? In retrospect, the signs of his cynicism were always there.

In The Dream Shall Never Die, Salmond describes how he spent the first few months of the independence campaign courting bankers, media executives, and business elites before suddenly switching his attention to Scotland’s poorest communities as referendum day approached. Working-class Scots were useful to him only after it became clear they could carry the nationalist cause.

Salmond may have articulated the case for self-government in pragmatic terms, using the modernizing language of the liberal center left, but his nationalism was deeply sentimental. He loved the poetry of Robert Burns and wept in public to the strains of Dougie Maclean’s cornball nationalist ballad, “Caledonia.”

In 2008, he declared that Scots “didn’t mind the economic side” of Thatcherism all that much but “didn’t like the social side.” It was typical of Salmond to believe that Thatcher’s free-market reforms and her authoritarian policies could be separated out from the wider thrust of her reactionary politics.

There was an authoritarian streak too to Salmond’s political style. When he wasn’t drinking with journalists, he hated them, and sometimes barred reporters from his press conferences. He had a reputation for barking at his aides and underlings. He was, in many ways, Jurassic; an old-fashioned creature of the golf club and the curry house — mean, opportunistic, and dysfunctionally masculine.

These features fed into and inflamed his feud with Sturgeon. The feud was not ideological. The party Sturgeon ran for eight years — hyper-professional and committed to constitutional gradualism — was the party Salmond built between 1990 and 2014. This made his decision, as Alba leader, to attack her failed attempts to revive the independence campaign after 2014 all the more grotesque.

In the wake of Brexit, when the UK government refused Sturgeon’s request for a second, binding independence referendum, it was obvious that the nationalist project had run aground. Had Salmond been in charge of the SNP at the time, he would have pressed for a rerun of the Edinburgh Agreement — and the answer from London would have been the same: “No.” Yet Salmond continued to needle Sturgeon, mindlessly, from the sidelines.

Salmond’s sullen obsession with Sturgeon in his final years intensified the divisions in the independence movement he claimed to love. I got to know Salmond a bit, watched him for more than two decades from a distance, and grew to dislike him. I’ll remember him as the SNP’s most important leader, the dominant politician of the devolutionary age. Like the movement itself, he was conflicted, ridiculous, distempered, and formidable.