Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland and titan of nationalist politics who died on Saturday, regarded the 19th-century Irish home rule champion Charles Stewart Parnell as one of his greatest political inspirations.
Salmond (69), who died suddenly of a suspected heart attack in North Macedonia after giving a speech at a political conference, gave the annual oration at Parnell’s graveside in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin in October 2016.
“I loved doing it,” he told The Irish Times during an interview in London last summer. “Parnell was one of my great heroes.”
Salmond compared Parnell’s fruitless pursuit of home rule with the current travails of the Scottish nationalist project, which has stalled in recent years along with the political fortunes of the Scottish National Party (SNP) that he led for 20 years in two stints until 2014. He took solace in the fact that, even if Parnell didn’t achieve his goal, most of Ireland eventually got independence.
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“When Parnell fell upon difficult times, the cause of independence didn’t fall with him,” he said. “The cause of [Scottish] independence is impossible to reverse. It’s as near an inevitability as you’ll get in politics. It’ll find its means and mechanism at some point. It’s just the timescale that’s up for grabs.”
Salmond was an economist by training but a politician by gut, and a formidable orator.
Born in West Lothian, he worked at first as an economist in the civil service on Scottish agricultural matters in London, where he met his wife Moira, and later as an oil economist for Royal Bank of Scotland.
A former Westminster MP and member of Scotland’s devolved parliament, he joined the SNP and established himself as one of the dominant voices of Scottish politics, serving as first minister for seven years from 2007. He led the SNP between 1990 and 2000, and again from 2004 until the aftermath of Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, the holding of which he had negotiated with former UK prime minister David Cameron.
“Cameron was an impressive prime minister,” Salmond told The Irish Times in his final interview with this newspaper. “He was no Einstein, but he looked like a prime minister. He had an insouciance, although that was also one of his weaknesses. He assumption was that there was no chance whatsoever of Scotland becoming independent.”
Salmond recalled the day in 2014 that he struck the referendum deal with Cameron and they announced it in Edinburgh. He said he set it up to look like “the signing of an international treaty”. For the benefit of the cameras, he said, he installed a map of Scotland directly behind Cameron marked with all of the SNP’s political seats.
“It is part of the art of politics to make your combatant feel less secure,” he said. “Politics is a science but it is also an art, and you have to have the ability to paint the weather. It you want sunshine, you must paint the sun.”
Although briefly in front at one stage in the 2014 campaign, the nationalists lost the independence vote by 45 per cent to 55 per cent and Salmond handed over the reins of the SNP to his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon. The referendum, although a defeat on paper, would prove to be perhaps the high watermark of Salmond’s political career for putting Scottish independence firmly on the UK’s agenda.
Salmond later had a spectacular falling-out with Sturgeon over allegations made against him of inappropriate behaviour with women, which he denied. An inquiry later found Salmond had been treated unfairly in a party investigation and in 2020 he was also found not guilty in a criminal court of a range of sexual offences, which he had claimed were a political set-up. He later left the SNP and founded the Alba party as a rival nationalist outfit, although it gained little electoral traction.
Angus Brendan MacNeil, a former SNP MP based in the Outer Hebrides whose mother was from Waterford, said Salmond died still a “colossus” of Scottish politics. MacNeil, who quit the SNP in 2023, was politically close to Salmond although he didn’t join him at Alba. They remained in close contact right until Salmond’s death, exchanging WhatsApp messages and talking on the phone.
“Somebody sent me a text on Saturday to say he had died,” said MacNeil. “You just don’t believe that kind of thing when you read it. I am in complete shock. It was a gut punch.”
MacNeil recalled the first time as a young political activist that he met Salmond, at an SNP conference in the 1990s. He said there was a bomb scare and he was sent to pass a note about it to someone near the stage, who then passed it on to Salmond, who was in the middle of a speech.
“He just put it to one side and continued with his speech,” he said.
MacNeil said Salmond “liked people; he could also like people he disagreed with and he didn’t have much rancour with them”. In much of the unionist UK media in London, however, Salmond was often portrayed as a demagogue.
“His flaws were greatly exaggerated and the truth of all of that will come out eventually,” said MacNeil. “He was a political colossus who just about changed Scotland’s future. He made Scots realise that they can be independent. He has set the nation on a road.”
Later in his career, as his political fortunes seeped backwards, Salmond embarked on a media career, including his own show on the Russia-funded television outlet RT. His enduring interest in Ireland and Irish nationalism was underlined in 2018 when he travelled to Dublin to conduct a series of interviews with former taosieach Bertie Ahern, former president Mary McAleese, and the then-newly elected leader of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald.
“Tell me about your own background,” he asked McDonald. “Tell me about how you got into politics. You’re a Dublin girl….”
“I’m a Dublin woman, Alex,” a smiling McDonald replied, as Salmond grinned back at her.
Much like his hero Parnell, Salmond died without fulfilling his lifetime’s political objective, and with his reputation damaged by allegations of sexual misbehaviour.
Yet his huge impact on Scottish politics remains unmatched by any of his rivals and his ultimate influence on Scotland’s constitutional future may yet turn out to be profound, if Salmond’s independence dream is ever realised by others.
Quoting Parnell in his graveside oration eight years ago this month, Salmond insisted that, step by step, independence would eventually come: “We shall not do anything to hinder or prevent better people who may come after us from gaining better things than those for which we now contend.”
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