Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.
• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country
• Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars
• The arrogant superbanker whose stunning hubris brought Britain to its knees
• The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM
• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions
• The cooking revolutionary who overthrew traditional British dishes
• Modern British dating is a car-crash – and Cilla Black is to blame
Alex Salmond would have been outraged by the suggestion he’d played the slightest part in breaking Britain.
Pint of cider in one hand, scrounged cig in the other, the late SNP leader could wax lyrical for hours about the history of these islands, the kings, the poets, the warriors. Until the day Salmond died in October 2024, he’d have insisted his was a mission to build a better Britain. It just so happened the best way to do that was to destroy the United Kingdom.
Salmond took defeat by 55-45 in 2014’s independence referendum badly and spent the rest of his life complaining bitterly voters had been tricked. But while the man who led the SNP from the political fringes into the mainstream and became Scotland’s first nationalist First Minister didn’t smash the UK, he caused damage that might never be repaired.
When Salmond announced his resignation as leader of the SNP in 2000, he felt a failure. Aged 45, he felt he’d become too divisive to advance the prospects of the party he’d joined in 1973. Plus, there was the inescapable truth that Salmond found Holyrood too small.
He reckoned himself a big beast of the political jungle and, having dreamed of recognition as a global statesman, spending each week being drolly humiliated by Labour’s comically lugubrious First Minister Donald Dewar was a kind of torture.
Plus, Salmond missed the lifestyle – the bars, the restaurants, all the mouth-watering temptations of the decadent imperial capital at night. He gave up his seat in the Scottish Parliament in 2001, remaining as MP for Banff and Buchan (he had held the two seats simultaneously).
Had Salmond remained at Westminster, the damage he caused to the UK might have been minimal. But his ego would not permit him to stand by while lesser politicians destroyed the party he’d led for a decade.
After the men in grey kilts visited then SNP leader John Swinney (Scotland’s current and astonishingly drab First Minister) to tell him to resign, Salmond’s protégé Nicola Sturgeon threw her hat in the ring. When it became clear she’d lose Roseanna “Republican Rose” Cunningham, an independence-nothing-less fundamentalist, Salmond came roaring back.
Sturgeon joined Salmond on a joint ticket and they made an unstoppable force.
Three years after his return, Salmond led the SNP to victory in the 2007 Holyrood election.
The late nationalist leader was an early adopter of the “so what?” approach to scandal that now pervades our politics. When nationalist politicians found themselves in circumstances that would, previously, have been considered career-ending, Salmond refused to give an inch to what he considered a hostile press.
When it emerged the married SNP MP for the Western Isles, Angus MacNeil, had ended up drunk in a hotel room with two students, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, after attending a ceilidh, Salmond shrugged it off as a “romp”.
When a tabloid revealed Nicola Sturgeon had written to a judge, urging leniency on a constituent found guilty of fraud, he instructed her not to concede anything to her critics.
Salmond was incandescent when Sturgeon disobeyed this order and apologised for her actions.
Salmond’s approach to damaging news stories was to deny or, when that was not possible, distract. He recognised the fading power of the tabloid press and the growing potential of social media. Why would he throw a colleague under a bus because a red-top with a dwindling readership thought he should when he could post a film online “refuting” something?
The late nationalist leader was a pioneer of the “fake news” response to damaging information and, watching closely during the early years of his First Ministership was his American chum, Donald Trump.
Trump spent a lot of time in Scotland during the early years of Salmond’s leadership and this pair of Alphas got on well, until they didn’t.
In 2008, Salmond’s government intervened to overrule Aberdeenshire Council’s rejection of Trump’s plan for a £1 billion golf resort.
Not only did Salmond show Trump how to deal with a hostile press, he demonstrated to him a style of political leadership that didn’t depend on traditional niceties.
Salmond returned to Westminster after referendum defeat but lost his seat in 2017 and pitched up as the host of the Alex Salmond Show on the Kremlin-funded propaganda channel RT, formerly Russia Today.
By the time Salmond stopped taking the Ruble in 2022, the production company he owned with former MP and close friend Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh had made almost £4 million.
Salmond argued he had editorial freedom while working RT. This was true: the former First Minister was free to choose which guests he featured as he made the case to undermine the UK on a Vladimir Putin-approved television channel.
In 2020, Salmond found himself in the dock at the High Court in Edinburgh, charged with 14 counts of sexual misconduct, including attempted rape, while he was First Minister. He walked free, his innocence confirmed, but his reputation never recovered.
Salmond’s protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, has recently been touring the nation explaining why she failed to realise her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, had rinsed more than £400,000 from SNP accounts while she was leader and he chief executive.
Sturgeon’s mentor would also have had questions to answer were he still alive.
More than 30 years ago, money went missing from Salmond’s Peterhead office account. Instead of calling in police, Salmond covered it up and allowed the alleged thief to go on to bigger things.
If it was Murrell, if only Salmond had handed him over to the police in 1993.
Salmond once imagined himself an incipient father-of-the-nation.
But the legacy of a politician who showed Donald Trump the ropes and took millions legitimising Vladimir Putin’s brutal regime is a coarsening of our politics and the erasure of accountability.
However, very much a fan of the last laugh, Salmond may yet – if there is an afterlife – enjoy his.
The late SNP leader failed to win independence in his lifetime but he created a route for modern populist nationalist parties, currently being followed to great success by both Plaid Cymru in Wales and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland.
As a political leader Alex Salmond created divisions in Britain that continue to widen long after his death.