In the end, Alex Salmond’s was a career of failure — not in the cliched use of Enoch Powell’s aphorism but in the absolute terms of failing to achieve his specific and declared political ambition. Alex — he was a “first name politician” for most of his career — never achieved the independence for Scotland that was his lifelong political dream. True, he transformed the Scottish National Party (SNP) from a fringe party into the natural party of government in Scotland, where they have ruled for the last 17 years. But having persuaded David Cameron to grant him an independence referendum on the SNP’s terms — they chose the question, the franchise, and the timetable — he fell short.
Salmond’s post-referendum career was defined by a falling-out with Nicola Sturgeon, his former deputy, and long-time protégé. The row culminated in a series of investigations, court cases, and a Scottish parliamentary inquiry. Salmond was accused of 14 counts of sexual assault and cleared in the High Court of Scotland. But though he won there, he lost in the court of public opinion. The accounts of the trial, and of Salmond’s behaviour with the women who accused him, described actions inappropriate for any public figure. His defence at trial could be summarised as: while Salmond might be a creep, he wasn’t a crook.
Both these aspects of his career pose hard questions about the nature of politics, of acceptable behaviour, and of what those in politics tolerate — and why. There is no doubt that Salmond was a formidable political operator. As a member of the 79 Group, he rethought the political strategy of the SNP from the bottom up. The group was formed after the 1979 referendum on the Scottish Assembly failed because of low turnout. The argument that the SNP should turn to the Left was given further urgency after the SNP lost nine of its 11 MPs when Margaret Thatcher swept to power. Although Salmond, and others, were expelled from their party because of their factional organisation, he returned to membership quickly and the SNP’s successful positioning as a “social democratic” government derives from this turn.
His rethinking of independence as “independence within Europe” was a similarly significant repositioning. Long before “Remain” became a political identity within UK politics, Salmond intuited that the breadth of the European Union and the openness of the European identity were an important counterbalance to the attitude that an independent Scotland would be a narrow, small nation.
A bombastic character, his wit and sense of theatre softened what could have at times come across as bullying. His greatest moment was probably when in 2007, after an indecisive election in which the SNP won one more seat than Scottish Labour, he flew into Prestonfield House in Edinburgh in a helicopter. Landing, he held a US-style press conference — podium and all — where he proclaimed a plurality of seats as a great victory, successfully brow-beating his opponents and the media into accepting his definition of reality.
This was one of his supreme skills. There is often talk in modern politics of “framing”, “messaging”, and “narrative”. But what that really describes is the power of political storytelling: a great politician defines what matters and what is irrelevant. Alex Salmond’s first administration was a minority government supported by the Scottish Conservatives. Yet that didn’t prevent the SNP from attacking Scottish Labour as “Tartan Tories”. The structuring power of political rhetoric was one of Salmond’s great powers and he mesmerised his opponents — neither Labour nor Tory governments could outplay him. Everything good in Scotland, he argued, came from the Scottish Government while everything bad was imposed by Westminster.
But lost inside that argument was the fact that it was New Labour’s devolution settlement which gave Salmond the platform to make his case — here and abroad, for he was an international figure too. It’s a settlement that has been tested by two global crises — the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the pandemic — and proved resilient.
There was always a darker side to Salmond, though. One senior Scottish civil servant told me that “He would never be mistaken for a nice man”. The rumours about his treatment of female staff didn’t surface publicly until the 2018 Scottish Government investigation into complaints, which raises an abiding question about Salmond, his party, and the broader political class, which let behaviours go unchallenged. Politics, despite advances in women’s representation to the highest level, remains a resolutely masculine profession in culture and language. And it stands apart from both public services and private companies where the language and behaviours tolerated inside politics would lead to prompt dismissal, rather than “boys will be boys” shrugs.
Nicola Sturgeon’s words on Alex Salmond’s sudden and shocking death are typically thoughtful: “Obviously, I cannot pretend that the events of the past few years which led to the breakdown of our relationship did not happen, and it would not be right for me to try. However, it remains the fact that for many years Alex was an incredibly significant figure in my life, He was my mentor, and for more than a decade we formed one of the most successful partnerships in UK politics.”
All true, and yet there is a reason that Salmond took Scotland so close to independence. He was a harbinger of the new populist style in politics — one led today by Nigel Farage in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, and Donald Trump in the United States. It is in Trump — or in Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi — that one finds the match for Alex Salmond’s complex and flawed form of political leadership. It changes things, breaks things, but also reinforces a darker culture of discrimination. And while it might be true that political careers end in failure, it is also necessary that they are followed by clear-eyed scrutiny. Which means responsibility falls on all of us, myself included, who failed to ask the tough questions during the Salmond era. Charisma is important in leadership, but it should never go unquestioned. Politicians, like all of us, are all too human — voters, and history, deserve to see them in the round.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/