The death of a politician is guaranteed to provoke a frenzy of tributes and hagiography. On the part of his devoted followers, it is sincere; in the case of his rivals and opponents, it is often hypocrisy, performed to placate public opinion and to conceal relief that a competitor is no longer a threat. In other words, it is a posthumous continuation of the dark art of politics, executed on the same calculations as obtained when the departed was still active in the public square.

The death of Alex Salmond inspired at least two national newspapers to employ the term “titan” in banner headlines on their front pages. Salmond was a very effective operator, his electoral success counterbalanced by some remarkable political solecisms: he was a significant political figure who, for more than a decade, dominated public life in Scotland; but he was not a titan.

The responses to his demise have ranged from the extravagant eulogizing of the political class to a minority of iconoclastic commentaries highlighting his more egregious deficiencies and blunders. Any objective assessment will place him somewhere between the two extremes. Politicians today increasingly fixate upon what they call their “legacy”, a concept that often fits very ill with their actual careers: there is frequently a disparity between career and legacy, and Salmond was an example of that dichotomy. His career, in the sense of advancing his personal status and agenda, was largely successful; his legacy was disastrous.

In career terms, Alex Salmond’s achievements were impressive. He entered the House of Commons at his first attempt, in 1987, defeating Albert McQuarrie, “the Buchan Bulldog”, for the seat of Banff and Buchan, and becoming deputy leader of the SNP that same year. Three years later, he became leader. In terms of personal ambition, that was an undoubted achievement; but the broader reality was that Salmond was just one of four Scottish nationalist MPs – the notorious “taxi-load” – going to Westminster. At the 1997 general election, their number was increased to a modest six. 

Yet, a decade later, Salmond was heading a minority devolved government in Scotland. It is not mean-minded disparagement of his record to point out that Salmond did not kick open the door to a massive expansion of the SNP’s political presence, leading to government, through his personal abilities: the door was opened for him by Labour, in one of the most extreme acts of self-harm that even that tormented party has ever indulged in. Persuaded by Donald Dewar, Tony Blair agreed to a referendum on Scottish devolution which was won by the Yes vote, leading to the establishment of a Scottish parliament at Holyrood in 1999.

Labour somnambulists, having run Scotland as a one-party state for half a century, believed they had accomplished a great coup. George Robertson famously claimed that devolution would kill nationalism stone dead. Donald Dewar became First Minister of Scotland, having devised a voting system designed to prevent any party from gaining an overall majority at Holyrood. When he died the following year, a statue was erected to him, as “Father of the Nation”, in Glasgow, bearing the portentous inscription: “There shall be a Scottish parliament.” 

That was Scottish Labour’s epitaph: it lost power to Salmond and the SNP in 2007 and, if it should finally succeed in returning to office at the Scottish elections in 2026 – an outcome until recently thought probable, but increasingly being put in doubt by the rate at which Keir Starmer is alienating the Scottish electorate – Dewar’s Baldrick-style cunning plan will have deprived Labour of power for 19 years. Donald Dewar is not much spoken about in Scottish Labour circles these days, though his statue continues to provide an amenity to Glasgow’s pigeons.

The moral to be derived from that chronicle of personal vanity and political ineptitude is that Alex Salmond did not miraculously evict Labour and capture the governance of Scotland: it was gifted to him by his brain-dead political opponents. In the meantime, Salmond left the Scottish parliament in 2001, after a series of personality clashes, leaving the SNP under the lacklustre leadership of John Swinney (“Tremble, Mogadon shareholders!). When Swinney had to resign, following disastrous election results, Salmond returned as leader. However, as he was not an MSP, Nicola Sturgeon acted as parliamentary leader at Holyrood until Salmond was re-elected.

That happened at the Scottish election of 2007, when Salmond was elected MSP for the Gordon constituency, his party won 47 seats to Labour’s 46 and he became First Minister of a minority government, which did deals on a case-by-case basis with other parties. Since that time, the SNP has governed Scotland.

In 2011, Salmond broke through the gerrymandered electoral system created as a tripwire by Donald Dewar and gained majority government. As time passed, the SNP became exposed as wedded to gesture politics, obsessed with securing an independence referendum, and increasingly disinclined to address the intractable problems afflicting the Scottish economy and public services.

There is truth in the claim that Salmond’s securing of an independence referendum in 2014 was a remarkable personal achievement; but losing the ensuing plebiscite by a 10 per cent margin set back the separatist cause for a generation. Salmond’s clever political manipulation led to the definitive defeat of the objective to which he had dedicated his life. So, can his career be called a success, despite attaining the highest office in Scotland and making the SNP the natural party of government, considering that one, crowning failure?

That is the weakness of a single-issue party: if it fails in its core objective, then its stewardship of other issues in which it is less interested will be perfunctory and ineffective. So it has proved with the SNP. Salmond resigned after the loss of the 2014 independence referendum and was succeeded by his erstwhile protégée Nicola Sturgeon. That, notoriously, ended in tears. Squalid scandals involving both Salmond and Sturgeon badly tarnished the SNP. 

By the time of his death, Salmond, having survived a court case that could have led to his imprisonment, was leader of the tiny splinter group Alba and at war with the SNP, the party he had steered to power. It is impossible, in those circumstances, not to recall Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure.

It would be churlish, however, not to concede the achievements represented by Salmond’s taking his party from four men in a taxi to two decades of Scottish rule. In that respect, his career cannot be written off as a total failure. But what really reeks of noisome failure is his legacy.

It was not difficult for Salmond to dominate Holyrood, since, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But he never achieved comparable stature in the bigger pond of Westminster. Under Salmond and his party, Scotland became a greatly diminished nation. Even at a personal level, Salmond contributed to that decline. 

His ill-advised “penny for Scotland” tax hike campaign; his denunciation of the successful Kosovo intervention as an “unpardonable folly”; his “thousand extra policemen”, amounting to 500; his claim that primary class sizes would shrink, when they expanded; the “oil fund for Scotland”; his ill-judged (for a professional economist) acclaim of Ireland and Iceland (shortly before that country’s economic meltdown) as “the Arc of Prosperity” – those represented a remarkable number of solecisms for one politician to commit.

The statesman of SNP mythology was also the derided figure who, in his first week in office in 2007, demanded a separate Scottish Olympics team. Much of Salmond’s buffoonery became obscured by the even more outlandish initiatives of the subsequent Sturgeon and Yusuf regimes, with legislation passed imposing jail sentences for non-PC comments, even in the former privacy of a Scottish citizen’s own home, and male sex offenders identifying as female being directed to women’s prisons.

Salmond would not have embraced the Trans agenda, as Sturgeon and Yusuf did. He remained in contact with, if not the majority of the Scottish public, at least the saner elements among SNP supporters. The reason why Sturgeon fell into the woke agenda is not difficult to discern: deprived of its raison d’être of independence, the SNP, which had degenerated into a uniformly leftist party, relieved its frustration by indulging in control freakery over its fellow Scots, haemorrhaging support in the process.

Yet, although Salmond himself would not have indulged in such extravagances had he remained in power, the change in the party – and the country – was part of his legacy. It was during the Salmond ascendancy that the SNP assumed a monocultural aspect. Historically, led by free spirits such as Compton Mackenzie and Wendy Wood, the SNP had been a romantic nationalist movement, either innocent of ideology or at least heavily pluralist. Nationalists of that era believed people of all views should put their differences aside and strive for independence, after which normal political competition would be resumed.

However, the advent of North Sea oil represented the first opportunity to promote separatism with a plausible economic basis. Salmond and his contemporaries recognised that opportunity, seized it, grew their movement and, eventually, made huge political advances. It was no more than any professional politicians might be expected to do. In the process, however, something precious was lost. Nationalism became intolerant to a cultic degree. Anyone who did not support separatism was a Unionist lickspittle. Where other parties had opponents, the SNP had enemies. 

A climate of intimidation and fissiparous national division may not have been Salmond’s personal agenda, but it flourished on his watch and his rhetoric was hardly calculated to discourage it. The SNP’s criminal neglect of Scotland’s vital services – the Scottish NHS is in an even worse condition than in England and the state of the roads would appal General Wade – is part of Salmond’s legacy. On the SNP’s watch, Scottish school pupils’ proficiency, as recorded by the OECD’s PISA international league tables, have declined from 10th in Science, when Salmond came to power, to 27th, and from 11th in Maths to 30th, with Scotland ranked 15 places below Slovenia in that key subject.

The problem was not entirely created by Alex Salmond: it was devolution that opened the floodgates to leftist ideologues and incompetence. Since Holyrood opened its doors in 1999 to a parliament of pygmies, 129 Scottish villages have been missing their idiots. Labour, in its last years of ruling Scotland as a one-party state, from 1999 to 2007, with infantile legislation such as a ban on fur-farming, for which the legislation was well advanced before civil servants discovered there were no fur farms in Scotland, though they passed the law all the same, set the stage for the SNP’s even more flagrant abuses of power.

During long years in which Alex Salmond dominated Scotland, the country declined into a narrow, partisan, intolerant, socialist state. With a deficit of £22.6bn and the North Sea being closed down prematurely, a separate Scotland today, deprived of UK subsidy, would be a failed state. Under the narrow, Covenanter political climate generated by nationalism, Scotland resembles a landscape viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Alex Salmond’s stoutest apologists cannot entirely relieve him of responsibility for that diminished nation. Evidently, loving one’s country to the point of zealotry is no guarantee of its material or moral wellbeing.