Alex Salmond stands at the edge of the penalty box ochestrating a small group of children in the playground of the Dreams nursery in Insch. The prize is a whirligig emblazoned with the Saltire.
The former Scottish first minister and Scottish National Party leader had arrived in Dreams nearly an hour before, sitting on the edge of a bench chatting with children.
Salmond canvasses slowly. Earlier, he had visited a succession of villages in the Gordon constituency, north of Aberdeen, which he hopes to represent in the House of Commons after May 7th.
Before travelling to the busy nursery, Salmond, who was being driven around in a Dacia Duster, had gone with a small group of supporters and staff to the Kellockbank garden centre.
There, he spent ages sitting down in the centre’s popular and crowded cafe to speak at length with a female officer who had strongly supported last year’s independence referendum but was now concerned about spending cuts.
Self-belief
Salmond never lacked self-confidence. Nor does he now, believing he will easily defeat the Liberal Democrats’ candidate,
Christine Jardine
, who is running to take over from retiring MP
Malcolm Bruce
.
“About 50 per cent of people who voted Liberal last time will vote for me. Rather more than 50 per cent of the people who voted Labour will vote for me; and perhaps about 20 per cent of Conservatives, for different reasons.
"The Liberals will vote for me because they feel betrayed. They voted to keep the Tories out and they kept the Tories in for five years," he tells The Irish Times, sitting near the air-hockey table.
“Labour people will vote for me because they see this election boiling down to two visions: a progressive alliance or a Tory alliance. The others will vote for me because they’ll think I will be a good MP.” Such arrogance infuriates enemies.
Elaine Mitchell, a recently retired midwife, insists that a second referendum is not on the agenda for the election, but unlike others in the SNP she makes no attempt to disguise her desire for one as quickly as possible.
However, Vicky Harper, who has worked for Salmond’s campaign for months, argues that the referendum is not coming up on the doorsteps in Gordon, even at the homes of SNP supporters: “Nobody is raising it,” she insists.
Aberdeenshire strongly rejected last year's referendum, by nearly 60/40 – one of the highest No votes in Scotland. The "Anybody But Salmond" vote exists. However, many drawn a distinction between the man and the cause he holds most dear.
Hostile voters
Christine Jardine’s people speak of the “Anybody But Salmond” vote in a constituency which covers nearly all of the territory he has represented in the
Scottish Parliament
, bar a sliver at the north end of Aberdeen city.
Back in Dreams, the penalty shoot-out is run to Salmond’s satisfaction: a Bloomberg photographer, delighted to be free of the paranoid control of Labour and the Conservatives’ campaigns down south, is drafted in to act as the goalkeeper.
Once finished, the first prize of the whirligig is awarded, with no disagreements from the assembled children, who flock happily back with Salmond to the playroom, where yet more balloons are autographed.
Inside, he opts for a hard-back chair, rather than a low-slung couch. Once he is settled, the conversation drifts to a discussion about his football team, the Edinburgh-based Heart of Midlothian.
The club has overcome a financial crisis and relegation, partly with the help of 8,000 supporters who make monthly contributions, to a situation today where it is playing decent football in Scotland’s second-tier league.
However, politics looms on the edges of every conversation with Salmond, prompting him to remember David Cameron’s embarrassment when he could not remember whether he supported West Ham or Aston Villa.
“There are two things in life that guys never forget. One of them is their wife’s name; and the other is their football team. Nobody forgets the name of their football team. I don’t care how tired they are,” he says.
Then, he moves on to recall Lawrie Reilly, the late Hibernian centre-forward – part of the club’s “Famous Five” during the 1950s, who became known as “Last-Minute Reilly” for the number of games he rescued in the dying moments.
“You can always judge a football team by the number of goals it scores in the last 10 minutes. Reilly was the centre forward but his team were pushing, pushing, pushing for goals, for equalisers,” he goes on.
It is left unstated, but he see similarities between Reilly and himself. Last September, he resigned hours after the referendum result. Now, he envisages a return in triumph to Westminster more than a decade after he last left it.
His contempt for Cameron is visceral. Returning to football for a moment, he says: “Nobody cares if you are interested in football, or not; but they care if you pretend you are interested.
“Cameron is a bit of a shell. It’s all veneer. It is all a presumption of entitlement. Behind it, there is nothing. [George] Osborne does his thinking for him; and [Lynton] Crosby does his campaigning,” he says, dismissively.
Playing to win
Earlier, Salmond had played air-hockey with the children. Instinctively, he scored quickly, before he began to stop the puck and pass it gently to his seven-year-old partner. In everything, he plays to win.
Now, he delights in the near-panic on display from elements of the Westminster establishment at the prospect that the Scottish National Party could hold all, or nearly all, of Scotland’s Commons places, and hold the balance of power.
The efforts by the Conservatives to paint the SNP as northern ogres threatening civilisation prompts a derisive snort: “You can demonise me, of course you can, but demonise Nicola Sturgeon? You can’t demonise Nicola, it’s absurd.”
However, Cameron’s half-joking comparison of him to a pickpocket irks: “I say this in the presence of an Irishman: a Conservative Party that calls somebody else a thief, given the origins of the word ‘Tory’, is a bit muuuucchch,” he says, playing out the final word.
If there were any diplomatic niceties to begin with, they are gone now. Shortly after dawn on September 19th, he called Cameron to congratulate him, “because I am a graceful sort of guy”.
Minutes later, Cameron emerged on the steps of Downing Street, where he declared that extra devolution for Scotland would come in tandem with devolution for England – the so-called “English Votes For English Laws” project.
“Just in case we were too stupid to know what ‘in tandem’ meant, he said ‘at the same pace’. These were all developments that he hadn’t even discussed with anybody in England, let alone me.
“He was looking over his shoulder at [Nigel] Farage. That was all he could think about on the day after a momentous constitutional decision by the Scottish people,” he says, his loathing visible.
Close thing
Cameron could have emerged into Downing Street, declared the referendum to have been “a damn close-run thing”, saying that “it would have broken his heart had it gone the other way”.
Then, Cameron should have committed to the fast-track introduction of the extra self-government powers Scots were hurriedly offered in the final days of the campaign when the polls wobbled.
Such a measure might not have stopped the SNP’s post-referendum surge, he concedes: “But all he could think was . . . What was his slip the other day? Career defining? That’s just an indication of the smallness of the person we are dealing with.”
Salmond is no slower about offering advice to Labour's Ed Miliband, who he believes will have no choice but to agree a deal of some kind with the SNP after May 7th if he ends up in No 10, but short of a commons majority.
“Let’s say Ed Miliband is beaten on a vote. He doesn’t have the option of saying he’s fed up; he has to get on with it; or do what I did after [losing a vote during his time running a minority SNP government in Holyrood after 2007],” he says.
However, Miliband’s job in such circumstances is more difficult, since Salmond was able to negotiate separately with Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
Having negotiated with Labour on free prescriptions, he created a Holyrood majority with the Liberals over tuition fees “ironically enough, given what they did later in London” and with the Conservatives about business rates.
“The majority party should always try to get the smaller party into coalition. That is what I wanted to do in 2007. I wanted the Liberal Democrats to come into the coalition. They refused.
“If you can’t get that you want confidence and supply [covering votes on budgets and confidence motions] because you get security for a limited area of concession,” he says.
“Vote by vote, however, is much better for the minority party and much worse for the majority one. But nobody seems to have informed the Labour leader of the reality of that. But he’ll soon find out.”
