{"id":58218,"date":"2026-06-08T05:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T05:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/58218\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T05:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T05:46:11","slug":"the-man-who-could-still-tear-apart-britain-from-beyond-the-grave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/58218\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who could still tear apart Britain from beyond the grave"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who broke Britain?<\/a>\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0You won\u2019t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The arrogant superbanker whose stunning hubris brought Britain to its knees<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The hardcore socialist whose ruinous idea is why Liz Truss became PM<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert\u2026 who accidentally cost Britons billions<\/a>
\u2022\u00a0The cooking revolutionary who overthrew traditional British dishes<\/a>
\u2022 Modern British dating is a car-crash \u2013 and Cilla Black is to blame<\/a><\/p>\n

Alex Salmond would have been outraged by the suggestion he\u2019d played the slightest part in breaking Britain.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Salmond took defeat by 55-45 in 2014\u2019s 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\u2019s first nationalist First Minister didn\u2019t smash the UK, he caused damage that might never be repaired.<\/p>\n

When Salmond announced his resignation as leader of the SNP in 2000, he felt a failure. Aged 45, he felt he\u2019d become too divisive to advance the prospects of the party he\u2019d joined in 1973. Plus, there was the inescapable truth that Salmond found Holyrood too small.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s comically lugubrious First Minister Donald Dewar was a kind of torture.<\/p>\n

Plus, Salmond missed the lifestyle \u2013 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). <\/p>\n

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\u2019d led for a decade.<\/p>\n

After the men in grey kilts visited then SNP leader John Swinney (Scotland\u2019s current and astonishingly drab First Minister) to tell him to resign, Salmond\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Nicola Sturgeon threw her hat in the ring. When it became clear she\u2019d lose Roseanna \u201cRepublican Rose\u201d Cunningham, an independence-nothing-less fundamentalist, Salmond came roaring back.<\/p>\n

Sturgeon joined Salmond on a joint ticket and they made an unstoppable force.<\/p>\n

Three years after his return, Salmond led the SNP to victory in the 2007 Holyrood election.<\/p>\n

The late nationalist leader was an early adopter of the \u201cso what?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cromp\u201d.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Salmond was incandescent when Sturgeon disobeyed this order and apologised for her actions.<\/p>\n

Salmond\u2019s 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 \u201crefuting\u201d something?<\/p>\n

The late nationalist leader was a pioneer of the \u201cfake news\u201d response to damaging information and, watching closely during the early years of his First Ministership was his American chum, Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump spent a lot of time in Scotland during the early years of Salmond\u2019s leadership and this pair of Alphas got on well, until they didn\u2019t<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Salmond\u2019s government intervened to overrule Aberdeenshire Council\u2019s rejection of Trump\u2019s plan for a \u00a31 billion golf resort.<\/p>\n

Not only did Salmond show Trump how to deal with a hostile press, he demonstrated to him a style of political leadership that didn\u2019t depend on traditional niceties.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a34 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Salmond\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Nicola Sturgeon, has recently been touring the nation<\/a> explaining why she failed to realise her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, had rinsed more than \u00a3400,000 from SNP accounts while she was leader and he chief executive.<\/p>\n

Sturgeon\u2019s mentor would also have had questions to answer were he still alive.<\/p>\n

More than 30 years ago, money went missing from Salmond\u2019s Peterhead office account. Instead of calling in police, Salmond covered it up and allowed the alleged thief to go on to bigger things.<\/p>\n

If it was Murrell, if only Salmond had handed him over to the police in 1993.<\/p>\n

Salmond once imagined himself an incipient father-of-the-nation.<\/p>\n

But the legacy of a politician who showed Donald Trump the ropes and took millions legitimising Vladimir Putin\u2019s brutal regime is a coarsening of our politics and the erasure of accountability.<\/p>\n

However, very much a fan of the last laugh, Salmond may yet \u2013 if there is an afterlife \u2013 enjoy his.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

As a political leader Alex Salmond created divisions in Britain that continue to widen long after his death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who broke Britain?\u00a0Welcome to\u00a0The i Paper\u2019s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58219,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[7968,13,1143,3934,5987],"class_list":["post-58218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-alex-salmond","tag-britain","tag-scotland","tag-snp","tag-who-broke-britain"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116712910621857700","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}