Alex Salmond’s greatest gamble: Scottish independence

Nearly 25 years ago, Alex Salmond sat one night with allies as he prepared to challenge for the leadership of the Scottish National Party, a race that had come before he was ready.

Pressed if he was sure that the gamble was worth the risk, Salmond, by then just 35, turned to some of his favourite lines of poetry from James Graham, the 1st Earl of Montrose.

“He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small

That puts it not unto the touch

To win or lose it all."

He won that gamble. Next Friday, Alex Salmond will know if his latest one has succeeded, when the results of Scotland’s independence referendum are announced in the Edinburgh dawn.

Over two years ago, the Scottish first minister and Scottish National Party leader began the referendum campaign after finally reaching agreements on its terms with British prime minister David Cameron.

Traditionally, a third of Scots have wanted independence; a third have not; and a third have not been persuaded either way, or were not interested in the subject. Following two years of campaigning, the gap has narrowed: the number of people voting in Scotland’s poorest district – the local authority/housing association – will decide Thursday’s result.

Throughout, Salmond has done everything to make independence as unthreatening as possible to Scots, who have been told that everything will change, but nothing will be different.

Scotland, he says, will continue to use sterling; the Queen will remain as head of state; Scotland will remain a member of the EU and Nato, he pledges.

On the monarchy, there is no problem. On everything else, assumptions are being made that everybody else outside Scotland will fall in with its wishes. Throughout, Salmond has appealed to Scots’ optimism and hope, offering a vision of a more equal Scotland – though the details of how that could be brought about is lacking.

It has been a long road for the man born on Hogmanay 1954 in Linlithgow in West Lothian, a birthday he shares with Bonnie Prince Charlie. Born within hearing of the bells of St Michael’s, Salmond qualifies to call himself “a black bitch”, and he does – a title locals bear in honour of a black greyhound who died helping her starving master.

Within months, his father, Robert, and mother, Mary, voted in the 1955 British general election – with the Conservatives winning a majority of Scotland’s seats and a majority of its vote. In that election, the Scottish National Party contested just two seats, losing its deposit in one and taking just 0.5 per cent of the national vote – one bad election in a long series of such results in its history.

Growing up in Linlithgow, Salmond enjoyed, in his own words, a near-idyllic childhood, secure in the love of his parents, if cursed with asthma. His frequent bouts of ill-health brought long periods in his parents’ bedroom at the front of the family’s council-owned home “with a fantastic view of the swing-park”.

“I used to lie there, read and ponder. My passion was DC comics: I had the whole range: Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel, that sort of stuff,” he later recalled.

Perhaps rare for someone of his background in the 1950s, he emerged a self-confident man, “if self-righteous and contemptuous of criticism”, in the words of academic, Tom Gallagher.

Unlike many in the Scottish National Party then and some still today, Salmond has never hated the English, eschewing, too, the symbols of cultural nationalism.

“I learned to play the bagpipes when I was at university, but he hated the sound of them,” a university friend told his biographer, David Torrance.

If Salmond’s tactics have changed frequently, his core philosophy has remained steadfast: a belief that Scotland’s primary ill is constitutional, not economic, or social. “Scotland’s fundamental economic problem is not distance from markets but distance from government,” he wrote, shortly after the collapse of James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979.

But his opinions have changed, dramatically. In his earlier years he was against European Community membership, but argued later that Scotland could “be independent in Europe”. Equally, he was against Nato membership, but he brought his party to abandon that long-time pledge two years ago, believing that it would hurt the Yes vote.

For years, Ireland was the example: “I am very, very influenced by Ireland. Scottish families know at first hand how well Ireland is doing,” he said in 1997.

The year before, he told readers of his Glasgow Herald column: "Ireland has only one striking different from Scotland: it is no longer ruled from London."

He went on: “With the advantage of full independent membership of the EU it has used that membership to attract resources and invest in the future,”

A decade later, Ireland had, in Salmond’s eyes, become part of “the arc of prosperity”, along with Iceland, that came to grief in the 2008 economic collapse.

Curiously, the pro-Union “Better Together” – which has run an abysmally limp campaign for the most part – has failed to, or chosen not to, bring Ireland’s banking crisis front and centre into the debate.

Salmond worked for Royal Bank of Scotland during the 1980s, before he became an MP and before RBS began its worldwide forays that ended in disaster. Indeed, he became one of its public faces, delivering TV opinions on the price of oil and gas with practised and colourful ease – training that was to stand him in good stead later.

During his time there, he and a colleague set up a price index that tracked oil prices month-by-month and forecast the impact they would have on revenues. In 1984, the index had its biggest success when it accurately found that the British government was underestimating North Sea oil revenues by £1 billion.

Later, he ran into difficulties when it became known inside and outside the bank that he wanted to become an SNP MP for Banff and Buchan in Aberdeenshire. Illustrating the poisonous nature of Scottish politics, some Conservatives struck up a letter-writing campaign warning that they would close their accounts if the bank did not bring him to heel. Wanting to defend Salmond, the bank’s chief executive, Charles Winter, contacted “a respectable Tory” who warned others off, saying that “the Royal should not bow to underhand tactics”.

A banking cheerleader Such history may have played a role later when he was RBS’s biggest cheerleader under chief executive Fred Goodwin as the latter tried to buy ABN/Amro – the deal that broke the bank.

In one enthusiastic letter sent to Goodwin’s office in RBS’s gargantuan Gogarburn headquarters shortly after he became first minister, Salmond offered “any assistance possible” with the deal.

The SNP leader was far from alone, either in the UK or anywhere else, in failing to see the banking crisis coming; but he was slow, too, to see that it had already arrived. Even after RBS had reported the second-largest loss in banking history, Salmond remained hopeful that RBS would recover, if occasionally tongue-tied on TV.

He was certain, he said optimistically, that it would “overcome current challenges to become both highly profitable and highly successful once again”.

Before the crash, he pledged that an independent Scotland would offer “light-touch regulation”, proper for an industry “with an outstanding reputation for probity”.

His banking experience has left Salmond with a belief in low business taxes – which may prove increasingly at odds with the social justice banners displayed during the Yes campaign.

In 2007, Salmond became first minister of Scotland for the first time by offering an optimistic agenda to Scots; but playing, too, on a belief that Labour had had things their own way for too long. He ran a minority government, and he ran it well, believing that Scots had to be convinced first that the SNP could run Holyrood competently before they could be faced with the question of independence.

The Salmond factor Not for the first time, he was helped by his enemies. The Liberal Democrats rejected an early but unrepeated offer of coalition; while the Opposition blinked on the occasions when matters came to the brink in the Holyrood parliament.

Four years later, the SNP prepared for further gains, but even they were surprised by the scale of majority victory – a result that was said to have been impossible under the rules that set Holyrood up in 1999.

“We have simply not got to grips with the Salmond factor in this election. Some people in our campaign believe that if they hate [him] then everyone else should hate him,” one Labour candidate complained during the campaign.

However, there are contradictions aplenty. The SNP demands more powers from London, but it has centralised power in Edinburgh wherever it has been possible. Council taxes have been frozen, though this has benefitted the middle-classes and the rich most of all, while prescription charges – which had already been abolished for many – were ended for all.

Former Labour minister Brian Wilson – no friend of Salmond, it has to be said – says “the most remarkable fact” about the SNP’s time in power is the lack of a social imperative.

“The SNP is Scotland’s Fianna Fáil: Big tent, non-ideological, populist, everything to be resolved though constitutional change, unembarrassed by where the money comes from since Scottish millionaires are, by definition, part of the same, big happy family as the rest of us,” he says.

Equally, there are signs of an authoritarian streak that dislikes opposition: Holyrood’s already weak committee structure has been neutered beyond all recovery; while debate is discouraged, not encouraged.

If Salmond’s judgment about Fred Goodwin and RBS was wrong, it did display Salmond’s tendency to remain loyal, one that is rare, perhaps, in the upper reaches of politics.

“Personally, his strength is loyalty towards individuals,” says John Swinney, who replaced Salmond for four years as head of the SNP before the latter’s “king o’er the water return” from London.

But he is not an easy man to work for. In fact, the experience has left many scarred and has seen Salmond having to deny charges of bullying. Nevertheless, the young and ambitious still want to work for him: “He’s really one of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked for and will ever meet,” one staffer says.

Intensely private, Salmond remains an enigma for most, if not all of those who have worked alongside him during his political career, some of them for decades. His 34-year-long marriage to Moira, who was once his boss during a period as a civil servant in the Scottish Office and who is 17 years older than him, is the most private chapter of all.

Today, she remains his strongest, if nearly always silent, ally, but one whose importance in Salmond’s life is never underestimated by those who have dealings with one, or both.

“I don’t use my family as a prop in politics. I’ve never done it, I don’t approve of it and I am not going to start it,” he once said, while he has been deeply angered on the occasions when she has become the story.

Such anger is not to be relished, because Salmond has a cruel tongue. Michael Forsyth, a St Andrew’s University contemporary of Salmond, was a particular subject of loathing. Like Salmond, Forsyth was born into the lower-middle classes. Unlike Salmond, he joined the Young Conservatives when he arrived at the historic Fife institution.

“He arrived at St Andrew’s drinking pints of heavy and left drinking gin-and-tonic. People change their minds, of course, but he changed his drinking habits, his politics and his accents,” Salmond said later.

However, there is kindness, too. One Scottish journalist remembers Salmond, then a House of Commons MP, coming to him after he had heard that the journalist had been sacked.

“He said, ‘If there is anything I can do, if you need a reference, if I can help in any way, let me know and I will’,” the reporter recalls, satisfied that the promise made would have been kept.

On occasions, he goes to extremes. During his first visit to Washington as first minister he was told that an American woman who had helped the party for years was bed-bound, ill with cancer. “He left his advisers, jumped into a cab, bought flowers, arrived at her door on the outskirts of DC, walked in (he knew she left the door open) and sang an old Burns lullaby until she came down,” says a former aide, Colin Pyle. “She was startled to say the least, but it gave her energy for months.” Another former aide says that “he’s always a bit embarrassed if you catch him being nice”.

President for a day Salmond loves the big gesture, as he showed during the World Cup in France in 1998 when he was one of thousands of Scottish fans who travelled to support “The Tartan Army”.

Some 10,000 Scots without tickets for Scotland versus Morocco had gathered in the main square in St Etienne to watch it on an outdoor screen, but French TV channel Canal Plus was not showing it. Salmond rang the office of Canal Plus’s chief executive, introducing himself as Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. The secretary was unimpressed, and he got nowhere.

“Then I said I was Alex Salmond, the president of the Republic of Scotland, and that I wanted to speak to him right now. He came out of his board meeting and I managed to save the game.

“For three hours I was President of Scotland,” he recalled a few years later, still chuckling at his own chutzpah, but not averse either to the political title.

Sometimes, the dramatic act can be for more serious affairs. In 1997, a Peterhead trawler, the Sapphire, sank with the loss of four lives a few days after leaving port. The boat lay in 270 ft of water, but the British government refused to hire a floating crane that could have raised it to the surface and brought the dead home for burial.

A local campaign began. Salmond played a leading role, cajoling cash. In just four days, £380,000 was raised. By mid-December, the Sapphire was brought back into Peterhead. Hundreds of people, all of them in tears, including Salmond, stood at the dock while the bodies of Bruce Cameron, Victor Podlesny, Adam Stephen and Robert Stephen were recovered.

The coming week will lay the ground for the next series of dramatic acts in the life of Alexander Elliott Anderson Salmond, the man who has brought Scotland its “date with destiny”.

The journey has been a difficult one, filled with compromises, promises and half-truths that may threaten the future of an independent Scotland should it come about. However, Scotland’s referendum – even if it is one that Scots never believed they would face – is one that would not have happened without him, at least not now. For now, the fundamentalists in the SNP are silent in advance of the result, but many remain unhappy about the compromises that had to be made to get them to this point. Following the first TV debate against Alistair Darling – which he lost – Salmond felt the first cold winds of rebellion from within his own ranks, but they were quickly silenced.

If Thursday’s vote brings victory, Salmond will be vindicated. If not, then he will face questions about his future – immediately, or in the months ahead.

Superbly well-read, Salmond may have occasion in the days ahead to reflect once more on the words of James Graham, a man known to Scottish history simply as “The Great Montrose”. In his heyday, Montrose was feted for his tactical brilliance; helped by imported Irish infantry, he won victory after victory by surprising his enemy. In the end, however, Montrose, who had defected to the side of King Charles I, was hanged in 1650 in Edinburgh by the Covenanters, the men with whom he had once fought.

However, Salmond may think also of another Scottish figure, Robert The Bruce, whose victory at Bannockburn over the English was celebrated this year, its 700th anniversary. Before there was victory for Bruce, according to the account, there were years of defeat, near-despair. In one fabled tale, Bruce hid in a cave, watching a spider trying to weave a web. Again and again, it failed. Finally, a strand stuck to the wall. Success followed.

The story is an invention, but myths are made of such tales.

Salmond wants to create his own myth.