Everyone is talking about their last encounter with Alex Salmond so I’ll do it too. It was late last year, we talked on the phone a couple of times, and as it happens we didn’t discuss Scottish independence, we discussed his childhood, his views on the Scottish Government (not good), his views on the UK Government (not good), his love of Indiana Jones, and his thoughts on one of the Scottish politicians he admired above all others (not someone from the SNP as it happens).

As usual, the former First Minister and leader of Alba was assertive and confident and caustic and articulate and knowing (he knew the game so well he’d often say ‘here’s a quote for you’ or ‘use that quote, that’s a good one’). However, it struck me too, as it always did when I came across him, that his talents and skills – the ones that turned him into one of the most able and extraordinary Scottish politicians of the last 100 years – were also his flaws, which is often the case with great people: what makes you also destroys you.

The alpha-male energy for example. He was sometimes criticised for it but Salmond loved the blokey atmosphere at Westminster (mostly male then and mostly male now) and his banter and style was well-suited to debating chambers and pubs and loud restaurants but less well-suited to meeting rooms and TV studios when over-confident male behaviour began to be questioned much more. I remember a young colleague of mine turning up to his first conference with him and Salmond chucking a packet of sweeties on the table, the implication being “I’m the man and you’re the boy”. Salmond later laughed it off as a joke but everyone knew it was calculated to make a point, and you've got to ask: who would do something like that?

People who worked with Salmond, men and women, knew this alpha behaviour could sometimes be an issue: Nicola Sturgeon herself once said, when she was still talking to him, that Alex Salmond was not as funny as he thought he was (she would later say worse things). The truth is his talents and skills were his flaws, and his flaws were his talents and skills: watching him in action, you could see how much his supporters and followers loved the loud, confident and jokey alpha-man and how good he was. The loyalty it inspired was also real and not always healthy: remember, if you must, the reaction of some of his fans when the claims of sexual assault against him first emerged in 2018; they were later thrown out in court.

Salmond’s political radar could also be very good and well-tuned, to the frustration of his opponents, but to be honest it had gone off a bit. He was spot-on in thinking in 2014 that there was huge support for independence yet untapped and he tapped it, taking it from the mid-thirties to the high forties. But he was wrong in predicting that his new party, Alba, was on the brink of a breakthrough and he appears to have been wrong (so far) that the SNP need to accept a new kind of confederacy of parties and activists to advance the independence cause. His death also means any threat to the SNP’s dominance of the independence movement, if it ever existed, is now even less likely than ever.

And Salmond could get things wrong on independence, partly because he over-estimated his own abilities. I remember him saying Brexit could have been the game-changer for independence and that, had he been in charge, support would have hit 60% but on this, I’m afraid, it was Boris Johnson who was right, not Alex Salmond. Speaking at a book festival the other day, Johnson said that “contrary to what the lefties said, smacking their chops, secretly hoping it would happen, Brexit did not break up the union” which is spot-on. Scots worried that the chaos and damage seen with Brexit would be replicated a hundred times with Scottish independence and not even Alex Salmond could convince them they were wrong.

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But let me tell you about one of the politicians Salmond himself admired because it’s revealing, I think; he spoke to me about him last year: John Wheatley, the Red Clydesider who served in Labour’s first government. As my former colleague David Torrance relates in his new book on the subject, The Wild Men, there were predictions of chaos when Labour first came to power but the King for one was rather enamoured of Wheatley, who told him about the extreme poverty he’d faced as the son of a miner. The King is said to have told Wheatley: “If I had to live in conditions like that, I would be a revolutionary myself.”

Salmond strongly connected to all of this, to Wheatley’s story, and it was for strongly personal reasons. It was Wheatley who led the 1924 Housing Act that massively expanded council housing across the country and Salmond saw it as the greatest achievement of that first Labour government. He also felt the positive effects in his own life and told me about the council house he grew up in, which was built in the 1940s. “It was brilliant and it’ll be there forever,” he said. “Some of the earliest social housing is some of the best in Scotland.”

I remember thinking, although I wouldn’t want to stretch the point, that Salmond saw himself as a continuation of the tradition of politicians like Wheatley and that he wasn’t entirely wrong. What every community needs, Salmond said, is someone like Wheatley, who’s part of the community and is campaigning to improve it and Wheatley certainly did that; as far as Salmond was concerned, he was the minister who achieved the most in that first Labour government.

(Image: Campaigning for independence)

And I think it’s fair to say that, in the changed circumstances of the 21st century, Salmond could lay some claim to have connected in a similar way to a large part of Scotland. Yes, he had faded more recently, as all old politicians do, and latterly he was often feted more abroad, in places like North Macedonia, than at home. Also, not even a man of his abilities could answer the persistent questions about the economic problems and cost of independence. But remember him at his height; remember the passion and loyalty of his supporters. That didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a feeling that Alex was part of them, one of them, authentic.

As for his actual, practical legacy, that is another question entirely. I would argue, as a conservative and a unionist, that Scotland is a more fractious and less efficient place because of the prolonged debate about independence which was powered to a large extent by Salmond; and to that extent I do not like or appreciate what he did.

But I admired him too you know, for all the qualities that were sometimes flaws and sometimes skills: the fact that he was assertive and confident and caustic and articulate and knowing. It’s also significant that one of the hardest things to imagine, now he’s gone, is who might replace him at the pinnacle of the independence movement and, most importantly, have a similar or greater effect on it. Take a look around for yourself and tell me what you think. We’re going to have to wait a long, long time aren’t we?