Alex Salmond intimidated his enemies and inspired his followers. He united his party but divided his country. He earned both the love and the opprobrium of those he worked most closely with.
He was a man of contradictions, capable of soaring rhetoric and colossal errors of judgment. But above all that, Alex Salmond was a statesman, a leader and, as far as the British state was concerned, far more than a thorn in the flesh: he was a dagger which was pointed straight at the heart of the British establishment.
He would not have remembered the first time he and I met. I was a young enthusiastic Labour Party activist walking along Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street in 1987 when an SNP event taking place in the McLellan Galleries emptied its attendees out into the busy thoroughfare. Among them was the recently elected MP for Banff and Buchan.
For some reason I was keen to attract the attention of the man who, even a few short months after being elected, was already a media celebrity.
I told my companion, in a suitably loud voice, that the man walking just head of us was Alex Salmond.
At the sound of his name, he turned and smiled. Then he saw the Labour rose badge on my lapel. But he kept smiling and, after a few pleasantries, he predicted that the next time we met I would have swapped the Labour rose for the SNP thistle.
The next time we met we were both MPs. I had not changed my party allegiance but that seemed not to matter much to Alex, who enjoyed cross-party friendships with a wide range of colleagues.
I well understood the view of many Labour colleagues, that Alex was beyond the pale, that his never-ending attacks on our party made it impossible to be in the same room with him for any length of time, unless that room was the chamber of the House of Commons. But I chose not to agree with them.
To be perfectly honest, I was a bit in awe of him. When he invited me for a drink one evening, after the end of another day’s business, I was keen to accept.
I might even have been a bit flattered that this giant political figure (no longer his party’s leader at this point) wanted my company. We walked together to the Smoking Room, a members-only bar just along the corridor from the main chamber, and ordered many whiskies.
There was much I wanted to ask him. For example, was it true that back in 1988 he had urged his party leadership to participate in the Scottish Constitutional Convention, a coalition of political parties and civic groups set up to draw up a blueprint for a devolved parliament?
It was true, he said, and then went on to explain the details of the conversations he had had and the arguments that, on that occasion at least, he had lost.
He was also happy to share gossip in a frank and usually very funny way, particularly about the deputy that the party had foisted on him when he was party leader – the former Labour MP and subsequently the Nationalist MP for Govan, Jim Sillars.
And he was engaging when talking of his exile from the SNP itself, when he had been expelled from the party in the early 1980s for being a member of the 79 Group, a socialist and republican organisation proscribed by the leadership.
There were moments of levity, too. One summer evening I spent a fruitless couple of hours in the Strangers’ Bar trying to have a friendly conversation with one of Salmond’s party colleagues in the Commons, Annabelle Ewing, now a Nationalist MSP. Annabelle was clever and polite, but she was the kind of Nationalist whom David Cairns, the late MP for Inverclyde, once said would answer a greeting of ‘Good morning!’ with ‘Good? What’s so good about living under the English yoke?!’
Anyway, after a while attempting small talk and, in return, being forced to defend Britain’s nefarious imperialist designs on Scotland, I gave up and headed home.
Alex and I were both living in Dolphin Square in Pimlico at the time so we agreed to share a taxi.
‘Annabelle’s hard work, isn’t she?’ I said to him as the vehicle moved off from Parliament Square.
‘What do you expect,’ answered Alex. ‘She’s a wummin!’
Then, after a considered pause, he added: ‘Worse than that – she’s a Ewing!’
Internal party rivalries in the SNP were and remain something of a mystery to me.
It was still reasonably early by the time we arrived at Dolphin Square and more whisky, more gossip and more jokes in the hotel bar followed.
Alex revelled in his reputation as a master of the media and he was happy to share a few tips on how to follow his example.
He had got into the habit, since he was first elected as an MP, of walking down to Victoria Station last thing at night and picking up the first editions of all the next day’s newspapers.
He would then sit in his flat or hotel room and digest the political stories, then phone up the various TV and radio newsrooms and ask if they wanted him to come on to their programmes the next morning to discuss whatever was in the day’s headlines.
By the time he appeared, he would have composed a handful of zingers that he aimed skilfully at his opponents, whether or not they were with him in the studio.
Sadly, Alex’s post-parliamentary career cast a shadow on his political legacy and it also provoked grave doubts about his judgment.
Did he really have to take Vladimir Putin’s shilling by agreeing to host a daily show on RT, the Russian state-financed propaganda channel?
And his founding of the rival nationalist Alba Party on the eve of the Holyrood elections in 2021 looked like petty revenge against his successor as SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, for her ‘betrayal’ of him during the police investigation into allegations of sexual offences (and of which he was subsequently acquitted).
But even such missteps can hardly erode his achievements.
He hijacked the entire devolution project that had been created by his opponents and used it for his own ends.
He forced the UK Government to grant him the one thing his party craved but which it feared it would never get, a referendum on independence.
And he came far closer to winning that vote than anyone – other than Alex himself – expected.
I will not claim to have been a close friend of Alex, but I’m happy to have a colleague’s memories of a man who will be honoured in Scotland as a political giant, not just of the independence movement, but of Scottish history.