The key to understanding what made Alex Salmond tick is to know that he was a gambler. Depending on who you speak to, his habit ranged from enjoying the occasional flutter on the gee-gees, to something more problematic.

The editor of a Scottish tabloid was so convinced it was the latter, they had a reporter permanently tasked with doorstepping bookmaker shops across the country, trying to solicit indiscretions from staff and punters, usually without success.

But his gambling instinct extended beyond the racetrack and the football pitch. It informed everything he did, personally and professionally, and it helps to explain why, for most of his life, he always seemed to be trying to recoup his losses.

When faced with a setback, rather than accept a tactical defeat and regroup, the former SNP leader and First Minister doubled down and ploughed-on regardless, never conceding the possibility that he could be wrong.

Political leaders are either seducers or enforcers. The former – who include Tony Blair, Emmanuel Macron and Nicola Sturgeon – attempt to win over voters with the reasonableness of their argument.

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The latter try to browbeat them into accepting their world view, and it was into this camp that Salmond fell. In this respect, he had more in common with Margaret Thatcher or Gordon Brown.

The same force of personality that brought Scotland to the brink of independence was also responsible for his gargantuan ego, and his zero-sum game approach to life meant that every conversation, encounter, or contact had to result in a win.

Despite his public bonhomie, he was an insecure bully, only ever comfortable in the company of those he regarded as intellectually inferior. He took his role as a demanding boss too far, deriving pleasure from humiliating colleagues in meetings, sometimes reducing them to tears, according to ex-colleagues.

When he was First Minister, advisers loathed putting him in a room with anyone who might be cleverer than him – cerebral political leaders, senior diplomats, and civil servants and especially experts, able to best him on points of detail – because of the fury he exhibited later.

My introduction to him was as a young political reporter on his north-east constituency’s daily newspaper, the Press & Journal. During an SNP conference in Inverness, he volunteered a sit-down interview, for the “journalist from the local press”.

When I turned up at the appointed time the following morning, his amicable mood swiftly changed when he saw that I had brought along a photographer. The interview was delayed while he disappeared for 15 minutes to groom himself for the camera.

His gambler’s instinct was combined with a trick of focusing on a weakness in his adversaries’ armoury, drilling into it relentlessly, regardless of the bigger picture.

In 2000, as a political correspondent on a national tabloid, I wrote an article revealing that the SNP was £650,000 in debt as it approached the following year’s general election and was under pressure from the bank to sell its valuable HQ in the Edinburgh New Town

Salmond took the article personally because, only days before, he had told journalists at the launch of his party’s election campaign, that it was in great shape financially.

Alex Salmond uses all his political prowess, and an ice-lolly, to influence a voter on Stirling University campusAlex Salmond uses all his political prowess, and an ice-lolly, to influence a voter on Stirling University campus (Image: Donald MacLeod)

He knew the only unprovable detail in the article was that the bank was forcing a sale, because it would never discuss a client’s details. He referred the story to the Press Complaints Commission to discredit it and me, as a journalist, and he also withdrew all co-operation of his press team from my newspaper.

Even after the PCC ruled in our favour, he couldn’t accept defeat. He called me early on a Sunday morning to claim that his aim all along had been to uncover the leaker of the party’s financial information whose identity, he claimed, had been revealed in PCC documents. It was a lie.

The same strategy was used in 2020 when he was accused of 13 counts of sexual assault and attempted rape by a series of complainants, who included some former Scottish Government colleagues.

Conscious that civil servants had not handled complaints to the letter, he targeted that weakness by suing the Scottish Government. A subsequent judicial review awarded him £500,000 in compensation, after concluding that the investigation by officials was “unlawful” and “tainted by apparent bias”.

It was a masterstroke by the arch tactician who ensured that, even before the criminal trial had started, he was cast as a victim of an injustice.

Despite being acquitted on all counts, the trial was far from a vindication of his behaviour with women. Even his own counsel conceded that he was “not a good man”.

Jurors either didn’t believe his alleged victims or they didn’t believe what Salmond was accused of amounted to criminality, but it devastated the complainants and sent shockwaves through the SNP and the Scottish Government.

The sight of Salmond basking in the glow of his exoneration was galling for anyone who had witnessed his entitled and inappropriate behaviour with women, first hand.

A man’s private life is his own but the problem for Salmond, and the women with whom he worked, was that he lost sight of the divide that separates personal from professional space.

A colleague and I experienced a revealing vignette when we dined with him and a young female aide at his favourite Indian restaurant in Edinburgh, when he was first minister.

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He was the only person to order a sweet and when the aide said, in throwaway fashion, she wished she had ordered the same ice-cream, he handed her the same spoon he had been using and invited her to taste some of his.

The embarrassed silence that ensued betrayed, not only the gaucheness of Salmond’s assumption of intimacy with a co-worker, but it left an unmistakable impression that this was part of a pattern.

His fall-out with Nicola Sturgeon, after he stood down from the SNP leadership following the failed 2014 referendum, was shocking but unsurprising to anyone who knew him.

It was evident from the outset that he would be unable to accept the change in the power dynamic of their relationship.

As long as she was his subordinate, he could tolerate her star being in the ascendant, but his ego could not countenance witnessing the degree of electoral success and celebrity she subsequently enjoyed.

His decision to work for RT – a branch of Vladimir Putin’s anti-West propaganda machine – and his founding of Alba, a breakaway mini-me of the SNP, further entrenched his irreversible advance to the margins of mainstream politics and discourse.

Salmond was a political giant whose stature and successes dwarf anyone in Scotland before or since, but as a human being he was deeply flawed.

I, for one, will not mourn the end of his destructive behaviour and the impact it had on other people, and I’d lay odds there are many others who feel the same way.

Carlos Alba is a journalist, author, and PR consultant at Carlos Alba Media. His latest novel, There’s a Problem with Dad, explores the issue of undiagnosed autism among older people