Dear reader, it’s up to you. In your hands lies the decision as to whether Alex Salmond is returned to the Scottish Parliament on May 6. Your vote, your choice.
The former first minister and SNP leader announced last week that he is setting up the Alba Party to contest the additional member lists. Salmond will put his name forward for the North East Scotland region, which elects 17 MSPs in total, seven of them through the list system.
What he needs, according to Sir John Curtice, is just under 6% of you to vote for him. This would give him five years at Holyrood. Five years to haunt Nicola Sturgeon, to toss grenades in her path, to bully the first minister into adopting a more extreme and aggressive approach to securing independence.
Five years to stir up, as he did before, the hardline cybernats and conspiracy theorists in their belief that Scots who take a different view are somehow “traitors” and “Quislings”, “Team UK” rather than “Team Scotland”. Five years to reinject his special brew of arrogance, brutality and deliberate division into the political bloodstream. Five years to foul up the chamber like a toxic bullfrog, sending the message to Scotland – to the UK, to the world – that even after everything, this is the kind of man North East Scotland believes to be a suitable representative of its people.
This is, as it should be, your democratic right. But really, folks, you won’t do it, will you?
Allow me to flatter you, but with genuine feeling: in my experience, you are the best of Scotland, an upright people, hardy and nonsense-free, granite in architecture and in principle, rooted in the land, the speak of the Mearns, the lilt of the Doric, but also at home in this fast-changing, fibre-optic world of ours. You are straight, decent and warm. People like you do not resurrect the whiffy career corpse of a man like Alex Salmond.
Do not be gulled by the positivity he is currently spraying around. He says that Sturgeon will and should be first minister, and that he will work with her to deliver independence; that he wants to be part of a pro-indy “super-majority”; and that he would like to help draft the next independence White Paper. He is presenting himself as grudge-free, a wise and constructive elder statesman.
Here is how Scots across the north and north-east split on Holyrood voting and independence
Well, it’s a little late for that. Only around 15% of voters (including SNP voters) have a positive view of Salmond – by contrast Sturgeon attracts a positivity rating of around 80%. Support for independence has been polling higher under Sturgeon’s leadership – even throughout the Salmond scandal and the Covid pandemic – than it ever did under her predecessor.
And let’s remember what kind of man he really is. He admits to being “no angel” in his dealings with women and in court his lawyer confirmed he could have been a “better man”. Out of court, the same lawyer put it slightly differently: Salmond was “inappropriate”, “stupid”, “an objectionable bully to work with… I think he was a nasty person to work for…a nightmare to work for.”
We’ve heard all about the tantrums, about the staff expected to tie his shoelaces and sanitise his hands, about female civil servants only entering his office in twos. Would you be happy for your daughter to work for him?
If you’re the kind of person who intends to vote for Salmond, then I accept there are real and probably unbridgeable political differences between us. So let me make a point about your self interest. I count myself as one of the “indy-curious” – a 2014 No voter who is open to persuasion next time round. You need me – you need lots of me if you are to win the referendum, and especially if you are to win it handsomely.
If, after everything, Salmond is elected to Holyrood and then placed at the forefront of an indyref2 campaign there is precisely zero chance I and, I suspect, many others would vote for independence. The tone, character and judgement of a movement all matter – their spoliation matters too.
Scotland has been through a difficult few years, our public life besmirched by the tawdriest of affairs and a psychodrama played out in public between Salmond and his ego. We all desperately need to move on, and the only way to do that is to remove the source of the trouble.
So, good people of the north-east, the rest of Scotland needs a favour. Don’t send Alex Salmond back to parliament – send him packing.
