The Scottish politician Alex Salmond, who has died suddenly at the age of 69, was a commanding figure who came close to breaking up the United Kingdom in the 55.3 to 44.7% independence referendum of 2014.
The decision by David Cameron to grant the powers to hold a referendum on Scottish independence marked the apex of Salmond’s formidable career and reflected his achievement in leading the Scottish National party to power at Holyrood.
Salmond’s power base lay in north-east Scotland but, under his leadership, the SNP transformed its electoral fortunes in the Labour heartlands of the central belt.
It was a paradox of his career that he was better suited to the cut and thrust of Westminster debate than the more constrained environment of Holyrood. He was an orator and debater who flourished on the bigger stage and became an influential player in the politics of the UK as a whole.
After Salmond lost his Westminster seat in 2017, a nightmarish sequence of events dominated his life and placed enormous strains upon him. These centred around allegations from within the SNP and Scottish government of inappropriate sexual conduct in earlier years.
Salmond was eventually cleared on all charges, but much of the damage to his reputation had been done. The provenance of these allegations remains bitterly contested, and at the time of his death Salmond was pursuing through the courts an action for damages against the Scottish government and named individuals, including his successor, Nicola Sturgeon. Recently, the former Scottish minister and scion of an SNP dynasty, Fergus Ewing MSP, described the pursuit of Salmond as “the scandal of our age”.
Born in Linlithgow, West Lothian, Alex was the son of Mary (nee Milne) and Robert Salmond, both civil servants. The local MP, Tam Dalyell, first encountered Salmond as a schoolboy at Linlithgow Academy who insisted on asking awkward questions about such subjects as prices and incomes policy.
The SNP was on an upsurge, on the back of the “Scotland’s Oil” campaign, a cause that Salmond embraced in 1973, becoming a leading light in student debating at St Andrews University and president of the Federation of Student Nationalists. He graduated in 1978 with honours in economics.
His first job was as an agricultural economist in the former Scottish Office. However, he was quickly involved in political activism as the SNP hit the rocks in the 1979 general election, after voting with Margaret Thatcher to bring down the Labour government. Salmond joined with others on the left of the party to form the 79 Group, which demanded a radical agenda directed at working-class voters.
This led to internal strife and Salmond – from 1980 employed by the Royal Bank of Scotland – was briefly expelled in 1982 with other leading lights, including Margo Macdonald and Stephen Maxwell. However, the episode proved cathartic for the SNP and it emerged stronger.
In 1985, Salmond became its vice-convener with responsibility for publicity. In Scotland, the general election of two years later was dominated by the poll tax, which the Tories had introduced in response to uproar from their own supporters over rating revaluation. Labour were the main beneficiaries, but three seats won by the SNP included Banff and Buchan, where Salmond defeated the incumbent Tory, Sir Albert McQuarrie. He also became deputy leader of the party.
Salmond brought a cutting edge to the SNP’s presence at Westminster. In 1988, he attracted national attention by getting himself suspended for a week from the House of Commons for interrupting Nigel Lawson’s budget speech. His election as leader of the SNP in 1990 created the platform for greater prominence and internal modernisation.
While Labour was dominant in Scotland under Donald Dewar’s leadership, it was acutely aware that unless an offer was made on the constitution, this position was vulnerable. Dewar’s response was to endorse a Scottish constitutional convention, along with wide-ranging elements of political and civic Scotland, to plan a prospectus for devolution.
Salmond’s SNP stayed outside the convention because its scope did not include independence. However, with Labour returned in 1997 and a devolution referendum on the agenda, he skilfully adapted that position to support a “yes” vote. Labour, terrified that without SNP support the offer of a devolved parliament might be rejected, welcomed him into the tent.
The belief that Holyrood in opposition did not greatly appeal to Salmond was reinforced when he resigned as SNP leader in 2000, but remained at Westminster. John Swinney succeeded him as leader and was not a success. When Swinney resigned in 2004, Salmond made a last-minute decision to enter the contest that Sturgeon was otherwise likely to have won. Instead, she settled for becoming Salmond’s deputy.
The electoral system for Holyrood was designed to prevent one-party domination and there had been a cosy expectation on the part of its founders that a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition would become the norm.
However, as Labour’s fortunes declined, this proved delusionary. In 2007, Salmond led the SNP to becoming the biggest party by a single seat. By now a skilled deal-maker, he persuaded the Scottish Tories to provide him with the majority needed to form a government.
In office, the SNP provided stable government with Salmond dominant. He was a man of ideas, an effective communicator and had built a good relationship with Scottish business. His trademark policy was universalism on issues such as free university tuition and benefits. While the middle classes were grateful beneficiaries, the principle also appealed to Scotland’s leftish instincts.
By 2011, with Labour still in disarray, Salmond achieved what the electoral system was not designed to deliver – a single-party overall majority at Holyrood with the SNP taking 69 of the 129 seats. It was the commanding nature of this result that persuaded Cameron he had no alternative to granting Salmond a referendum. Once again, Salmond proved a skilled negotiator in setting terms for the poll and framing of the question.
The protracted campaign for the 2014 referendum saw a substantial increase in support for independence, and in its latter stages opinion polls suggested that the “yes” side was edging ahead. However, the weakness of its case lay in the economic argument, around issues such as currency and (ironically as it turned out) continuing EU membership. The first televised debate between Salmond and Alistair Darling (who led the Better Together campaign) was particularly significant in this respect.
In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, Salmond announced his decision to resign both as first minister and leader of the SNP. It was a decision he would soon deeply regret. His protege and deputy, Sturgeon, succeeded him on the crest of a nationalist wave as the 45% that had voted for independence largely held together – enough to win elections but not a referendum.
This was reflected in the 2015 general election, when Salmond returned to his old stomping ground of Westminster as MP for Gordon but found himself as one of 50 SNP MPs and in a relatively obscure role. In the 2017 election, he lost his seat to the biggest Tory swing in the UK. Reduced to the fringes of both Scottish and UK politics, he took on an ill-advised role as presenter of a weekly programme on the TV channel Russia Today.
At the same time, his relationship with his successor was deteriorating rapidly. Salmond believed that his legacy was being squandered as the strategy for another independence referendum became increasingly unconvincing, to many inside as well as outside the SNP. However, Scotland was astounded by the turn in events of January 2019 when police charged Salmond with 14 offences, of which one was ultimately withdrawn.
Salmond always maintained his innocence, and this was eventually sustained in the high court in Edinburgh in March 2020 on all charges, but the bitterness created, and the questions surrounding the legal process pursued by the Scottish government, have never abated. In 2021, Salmond founded Alba as an alternative independence party to the SNP but it met with little success, depending heavily on his personal standing.
Salmond was, by any standard, a major figure in Scottish and UK politics over several decades. He attracted strong loyalties and deep hostility. But to very many Scots, he was a clever and committed politician with exceptional skills who took his party from a low ebb to the exercise of power and close to its ultimate objective.
He met Moira McGlashan when they were both Scottish Office civil servants, and they married in 1981. She survives him.
• Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond, politician, born 31 December 1954; died 12 October 2024
• This article was amended on 14 October 2024 because Alba was formed in 2021, not in 2022 as an earlier version said.
