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.
Salmond was the most transformative Scottish politician of his era. That is not really up for debate. When he was first elected leader of the SNP in 1990, the party held four seats in the UK House of Commons. By the end of his second term in 2014, nationalists dominated Scotland’s newly devolved parliament in Edinburgh and 45 percent of Scots, at least, wanted to annul their 1707 union with England.
This was Salmond’s achievement in a nutshell: on his watch, Scottish separatism, the primary political mechanism for the breakup of the British state, went mainstream. And there is no sign of it going back to the margins.
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…
Auteur: Jamie Maxwell
