There is not much Alex Salmond regrets in life – but if he could turn back the clock, he admits he would do anything to spend more time with his mother before she died.
Mr Salmond is a man who plays his cards close to his chest. But his eyes well up and his voice falters when he speaks about Mary – his hero.
He looks at the ground while he explains to us how he regrets dashing out to go canvassing during an election, instead of spending a few more precious moments with her the last time they were together.
“You asked me about regrets,” he said.
“The last time I met my mum was during the 2003 Scottish elections, and I had promised to go canvassing with a candidate.
“I dashed into mum and dad’s – I was in and out. My mum made me a quick cup of tea and something to eat, like she always did. I said hello, hugged her, then dashed out to go canvassing.
“I had just a few minutes with her, and she died the next week.”
Mr Salmond looks perplexed as he asks himself why he did not spend longer with her that day.
“I look back and I say ‘why on earth did I go out canvassing?. Why couldn’t I have sat and talked for a bit?’.”
Mrs Salmond died in May 2003 while climbing her 120th Munro with her local walking group, the Linlithgow Ramblers, in the Cairngorms. She was 82.
For a woman who was so fit and active for her age, it was the last thing Mr Salmond’s family expected. They thought she was immortal.
“For her, it was the right way to go. She died of natural causes and she was in her 80s, and what better place to go than in some place you love?” he said.
“But it was a huge shock for the family.”
Her death taught the politician a huge lesson in life, he says – that family always comes first.
“When you’ve got the chance make the time. Because you’ll regret it if you don’t,” he says, staring at us both intently.
Mr Salmond also faltered when he revealed he regrets not thanking his mother enough for conspiring against him when he was aged 15 – when he dropped out of school – to ensure that he continued with his studies.
The story goes that as a teenager, the young Mr Salmond was fed up. He had no money, was jealous that his chums were all working, and he was ready to embrace the world of work.
“I was quite enterprising, so I asked my uncle if I could have a job. He was a foreman at Stein Brick Works at Linlithgow,” he explains.
“I told my mum ‘I’ve managed to get a job, there’s no reason why I should stay at school’, and I was quite surprised that she didn’t raise any great objections.
“She said ‘fine, if that’s what you want to do, go for it’.”
But the job – as you can perhaps guess – was not quite what he had hoped for.
“My uncle might have been the foreman, but he gave me the worst, dirtiest, smelliest job you could imagine,” he said, his face contorted with disgust.
“I was shifting anthracite, which is something you do not want to do. And I was asthmatic, but your only protection was a face cloth.
“I wondered when I would get to wire pallets or have a wee saunter up to the office. Or alternatively, as my uncle was very into horse racing, maybe I could take the bookie’s runner box round.
“That struck me as a fantastic job. All you had to do was go from worker to worker with the box and people would put their bets in.
“You might even get a penny on a good day.
“That was the job for me, I said to my uncle. But he told me that everybody has to start somewhere and to just get on with it.”
After just six weeks, the teenager told his mother he was packing it in and going back to school.
“She just said ‘good, good’.”
And years later, as his uncle drove him back to St Andrews University, Mr Salmond discovered that his mother – “who was a very wise woman” – had in fact set him up.
“She had sorted it with my uncle that I would go back to school,” he laughs.
“She told him ‘you make sure that by the time you’ve finished with him, he will think that school was the best place on Earth’. And that’s what he did.
“When I recovered from the shock that my mother had conspired against me in such a way, I realised that she had done it out of love.
“She knew that if she had told me I was staying on at school, I would have done the exact opposite. So she decided to teach me a lesson in a much more effective way.
“I would commend it to anyone in such circumstances.”
We asked Mr Salmond if he had ever thanked his mother for conspiring against him – in the end an act of love which ultimately put him on the path to becoming leader of his country.
“Not enough, not enough,” he says sadly, sincerely.
“But then we never do. She was a great lady.”
He said that setting up a trust in her name to help young people was his way of thanking her.
He explains: “My mum spent all of her life helping youth organisations. So when I set up the Mary Salmond Trust I donated my MSP salary while serving as both an MSP and an MP, and I will do the same with the
first ministerial pension.
“I have given the trust only one direction, and that is that under no circumstances should they turn down an application from the Girl Guides.
“My mum spent 30 years and more as a girl guide county camp commissioner, so they must never turn down an application from them.
“I like to think that’s my way of thanking her.”