Alex Salmond Made Scottish Independence a Tangible Goal
It’s a year since the death of Alex Salmond, the most important Scottish politician of his generation. Although Salmond’s career ended in marginalization, there’s no doubting his achievement in popularizing the cause of Scottish independence.
Alex Salmond brought Scottish separatism, the primary mechanism for the break-up of the British state, into the political mainstream. And there is no sign of it going back to the margins. (Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images)
The dream shall never die. But Alex Salmond did, suddenly, one year ago today. I was in a hotel room in Seattle when a text came through from a friend in Glasgow: “Salmond dead.”
He’d had a heart attack in North Macedonia, over lunch, while trying to open a bottle of ketchup. My first thought was of the comedian Frankie Boyle, who once accused the former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader of being the human equivalent, calorically, of a cooked egg.
Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond liked to drink, liked to eat, and liked to stay up late. Everybody knew that. The miracle, really, was that he lived until his late sixties — Salmond was two months shy of his seventieth birthday when his arteries finally gave out.
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