Alex Salmond has admitted stepping down as First Minister after the 2014 referendum was a ‘mistake’ and he wouldn’t have done it if he knew Scotland would still not be independent after a decade.

Mr Salmond made the decision to step down the day after the vote – which the Yes campaign lost by 55% to 45%.

But in recent months, he has described the move as a “mistake”.

Speaking in a new documentary by ITV Border about the 10th anniversary of the independence referendum – named A Decade of Debate – Mr Salmond said he would not have handed off the reins to deputy Nicola Sturgeon at the time had he known how the next 10 years would play out.

“I thought to make a point of departure for the referendum in the future was a right thing for the national movement. Looking back, that was a mistake,” he said.

(Image: Colin Mearns)

“Now, in retrospect, that was a daft thing to do. But then… I thought we were set for independence in a reasonable timescale.”

He added: “If you’d told me then that ten years later, we’d still be waiting despite the manifest opportunities there have been, then I would have said, ‘well, I’ll just hang about then and see the matter through.”

But Ms Sturgeon questioned if that would be the case.

“So clearly he’s going to think that he could have done things so much better. I say that in as gentle a way as possible, to coin one of his favourite phrases,” she told the documentary.

Ms Sturgeon also spoke of how she was unsure if she wanted to step into Mr Salmond’s shoes when he decided to stand down.

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“It was more a sense of I don’t want just to sort of almost by default say, ‘yes I’m going to put myself forward.’ I wanted to take a moment to ask myself some hard questions,” she said.

“Not just ‘did I really want it’ but ‘did I actually really think I was capable of it?’. It was a sense of needing take a step back and reflect, which I did, and we know what happened after that.”

The documentary will be broadcast on ITV Border Scotland at 8.30pm on Thursday.