Alex Salmond, Scotland’s charismatic former First Minister whose career was dogged by controversy

He took the SNP to power and led the independence campaign, but fell out spectacularly with his successor Nicola Sturgeon

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister who has died aged 69, was the dominant figure in the Scottish National Party during its odyssey from the political fringe to the independence referendum of 2014, which momentarily looked set to break up the United Kingdom. 
Truculent and astute, he led the SNP to power at Holyrood in 2007, and after skilfully heading a minority administration for four years inflicted a crushing defeat on Labour in 2011, then set the stage for a referendum on September 18 2014, the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn. 
Salmond led the Scottish Government until his resignation after the unexpectedly close “No” vote – then from 2021 led the pro-independence splinter party Alba. In between, his career was marred by controversy, bordering on disgrace, over charges that he had sexually assaulted female civil servants at his official residence, Bute House. An internal investigation found by a judge to have been “tainted by apparent bias” culminated in his being awarded £500,000 in legal costs. 
His trial at the High Court in Edinburgh resulted in the jury acquitting him in March 2020 on 12 charges, with one not proven. The verdict was offset by Salmond’s counsel, Gordon Jackson, being overheard on the train back to Glasgow characterising his client as a “sex pest” and a bully.
These events brought a breach between Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, once his protégée and by then herself First Minister, his supporters accusing her of a “witch hunt”. 
A further inquiry into how the Scottish Government had handled the allegations exposed these strains. Holyrood refused to publish Salmond’s evidence to it, then he accused Ms Sturgeon of having made “wholly false” statements in her evidence, and lied to the Scottish Parliament. He subsequently sued the Scottish Government for £3 million.
Coming months before the 2021 Holyrood elections, the infighting damaged the SNP just as the polls were showing a majority for its goal of independence. And when Nicola Sturgeon was largely cleared of misleading the Parliament, Salmond wielded his dirk in February 2021 by launching his breakaway party, declaring independence an “immediate necessity”.
The formation of Alba strengthened Nicola Sturgeon by removing her most vocal critics from the SNP, and when the Holyrood elections were held it polled just 1.7 per cent of the vote, winning no seats – though it attracted two Westminster MPs.
Salmond’s trenchant criticism of Nicola Sturgeon two years later for “undoing years of work for independence” in upholding the right of a transexual rapist to serve their sentence in a women’s prison contributed to her own downfall. 
Though support for independence had been rising steadily, when the 2014 referendum was called it was doubtful whether there was close to majority support among Scotland’s voters. But Salmond set his exceptional political gifts to securing a shapshot vote in favour, and came close to pulling it off. 
Having lost a television debate with Alistair Darling, leader of the “Better Together” campaign, on the issue of whether Scotland would be able to keep the pound, Salmond bounced back to win the rematch. His claim that without independence the Conservatives would be able to wreck Scotland’s NHS – which was in fact devolved to Holyrood – struck a chord with Labour voters and workers in Scotland’s huge public sector.
Ten days out, a YouGov poll put the “Yes” campaign ahead, by 52 per cent to 48. Panic set in at Westminster over the practical consequences of separation. All three UK party leaders  – David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg – rushed north to campaign, warning of dire consequences for the Scottish economy.
Crucially, the former Labour premier Gordon Brown launched a barnstorming campaign for a “No” vote, announcing a commitment by all three parties to devolve further powers to Holyrood – an option Cameron had agreed with Salmond should be kept off the ballot. The leaders followed up with a pledge to maintain the “Barnett formula”, which guarantees Scotland more than its per capita entitlement of public spending.
On the day, Scotland’s traditionally Labour heartlands voted narrowly for independence. But the rest of the country, including Salmond’s Aberdeenshire power base, was swayed by economic concerns and voted “No”. The margin overall was 55.3 to 44.7 – far closer than anyone would have predicted at the start.
Salmond reacted by excluding media he considered hostile from a Bute House press conference; momentarily suggesting Holyrood might simply declare independence; accusing the Westminster leaders of already having welched on their promises; then announcing he would stand down as First Minister and party leader.
Prior to taking office Salmond, SNP leader since 1990 save for a four-year break, had supported Labour’s plans for devolution, as a step to independence. A Scottish Parliament achieved, he returned to Westminster when opposition at Holyrood proved frustrating. He reclaimed the leadership in 2004, and profited from Labour’s penchant for underestimating him to lead the SNP to power. 
In 2015 he was elected to Westminster a third time as the SNP captured all but three Scottish seats, combining the roles of elder statesman and irritant to the unionist parties. His initiative to set up a parliamentary inquiry into Tony Blair’s conduct prior to the Iraq War was defeated, but exposed an embarrassing split between most Labour MPs and the hard Left around party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
In the snap 2017 election, Salmond lost his seat to the resurgent Scottish Conservatives. Soon after, he was castigated by Ms Sturgeon for hosting a chat show on the propaganda channel Russia Today.
Rumours began to circulate that the Scottish government was investigating complaints that he had assaulted staff members at Bute House in 2013. Salmond challenged the investigation in court, and in January 2019 the government’s probe was ruled unlawful as the investigating officer had already had dealings with the complainant. Days later Salmond – who had resigned from the SNP in 2018 – was arrested and charged, and that November he first appeared in court. 
Always controversial and a political loner, Salmond had been expelled from the SNP in 1982 for his Left-wing views; unprecedently interrupted Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget speech; and condemned Blair’s military interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. Yet he led the SNP from a moderate – though always robust – position, asserting Scotland’s credentials to govern itself like the other small countries of Europe.
Salmond was a canny strategist. He calculated that the balance at Holyrood would eventually tilt against Labour, and when it did took every opportunity to wrong-foot Westminster, for example announcing that a new Forth road bridge would be built using a financial mechanism immediately rejected by the Treasury. The assertion by the UK Supreme Court, created by Blair, of some jurisdiction north of the Border despite Scotland’s discrete legal system, gave him further ammunition.
He considered his gradualism vindicated as he scheduled a (non-binding) referendum on independence for 2010 – only to backtrack when Labour shunned the necessary legislation. Armed with a majority, Salmond wrongfooted Cameron by delaying the poll to the date he considered most advantageous, reducing the voting age for it to 16 and excluding the 800,000-odd Scots living south of the Border (Scotland’s sizeable Polish immigrant community would vote solidly “Yes”).
Salmond’s success in leading a minority administration gave him the whip hand over Scotland’s other parties. When in 2009 Holyrood failed by one vote to endorse the SNP’s Budget, it took only a few days and minimal concessions for them to support it and avert an election they dreaded.
One decision of his government aroused global controversy: the release in compassionate grounds that August of Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted in 2001 of causing the Lockerbie bombing 13 years before in which 270 people died, who was supposedly dying of cancer.
Megrahi’s rapturous welcome in Tripoli offended many, particularly in the United States where PanAm Flight 103 had been bound. Criticism intensified as Megrahi’s health failed to deteriorate; he lived until 2012. 
When in 2010 an explosion on a rig drilling for BP in the Gulf of Mexico triggered an environmental disaster, Washington politicians tried to summon Salmond to tell them whether BP had lobbied for Megrahi’s release to facilitate its business in Libya. He responded that the writ of the US Congress did not extend to Holyrood.
A former Royal Bank of Scotland economist, Salmond understood North Sea issues better than Brown. He spoke credibly on economics until the “credit crunch” toppled the economy of Iceland, which he had held up as the exemplar for an independent Scotland. From 2003 he was visiting professor of Economics at Strathclyde University.
Salmond built a formidable base in north-east Scotland, as MP and later MSP for Banff and Buchan, whose fishermen he championed, then as MSP and finally MP for Gordon. He captured the first from the Conservatives, the second from the Liberal Democrats.
A formidable Burns Night performer, he was once described as “a cross between Yogi Bear and Macchiavelli”. Malcolm Rifkind early on branded him “an infant Robespierre”, and his anger was not something anyone wanted to experience twice.
Yet he proved adept at leading a fractious party whose problems had reputedly begun when it recruited its second member. When he unexpectedly handed over in 2000 to John Swinney, the SNP’s loss of firepower was immediate.
Salmond was helped in advancing his party’s fortunes by a subliminal popular belief that the SNP “stood for Scotland” and that attacks on it by the unionist parties as virulent as Salmond’s on them were unpatriotic. Complaints that his government’s initiatives to promote Scotland on the world stage had a partisan rationale, and that the government machine was being mobilised in support of independence, merely strengthened his position.
His own nationalism was rooted in “tales of Burns and Wallace” learnt from his grandfather. Yet Salmond also absorbed the socialism of his father (his mother was a “Churchill Conservative”). At St Andrew’s University he was torn until his girlfriend, secretary of the Labour Club, told him after one argument: “If you feel like that, go and join the SNP.”
Though he represented a traditionally Conservative constituency and benefited from what seemed a Faustian pact with some Scottish Tories, Salmond was no friend of Conservatism. He declared Margaret Thatcher’s social policies even more damaging than her economic ones, and scorned Tory compatriots who went south to find a seat as “Sudeten Scots”.
Salmond wrote a racing column for the Scotsman, and was an ardent supporter of Hearts. In the background throughout was his wife Moira McGlashan, a civil servant 17 years his senior he met when a young economist at the Scottish Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond was born on New Year’s Eve 1954, the second of four children of two civil servants, Robert Salmond and the former Mary Milne. From Linlithgow Academy, where asthma kept him in the classroom, he read Economics and History at St Andrews, narrowly failing to win the student union presidency. He worked as a Government economist, then in 1980 joined the Royal Bank, where he devised the monthly Royal Bank/BBC Oil Index. 
Within the SNP he co-founded the socialist, republican 79 Group after the party’s rout in 1979 following Labour’s abortive devolution referendum. He was elected to the SNP’s executive in 1981, expelled soon after, then readmitted. In 1985 he became the party’s vice-convenor for publicity, protesting to the BBC over the “English chauvinism” of its coverage of the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, with Scottish commentators relegated to “comic turns”.
Salmond resigned from the Royal Bank to fight Banff and Buchan in 1987. Ousting his apparently entrenched  Tory opponent by 2,441 votes, he held the seat for 23 years; after becoming First Minister he attended the Commons and spoke, but did not seek re-election.
In a party with just three MPs, Salmond became deputy leader to Gordon Wilson and spokesmen on energy, finance and fisheries. He first made headlines on Budget Day 1988, interrupting Lawson to denounce his tax cuts as an “obscenity”. 
The Deputy Speaker “named” Salmond, and the House voted to eject him; Labour MPs, piqued at not having thought of such action themselves, barracked a furious Chancellor for 10 minutes. 
With the poll tax introduced in Scotland a year before England, Salmond was prominent in the campaign against it, calling on Rifkind, then Scottish Secretary, to “apologise to the Scottish nation”.
In September 1990 Wilson stepped down, and Salmond comfortably defeated Margaret Ewing for the leadership. Mrs Ewing had the support of Jim Sillars, who had been Salmond’s close ally, and the rift between the two men took years to heal. A year later, he had to accept Sillars – briefly – as his deputy.
In his acceptance speech Salmond declared: “The SNP has a clear consensus on the left-of-centre in the mainstream of the Scottish political tradition. We are not campaigning for independence because it is a nice idea – it is politically and economically essential to save the Scottish nation.”
The SNP went confidently into the 1992 election. Sean Connery had come aboard; the closure of Ravenscraig steelworks, to Salmond “the final act of betrayal”, had damaged Tory prospects; and a poll showed one-third of Scots for independence. The SNP promised it in six months if it won a majority of Scottish seats.
Labour – and the media – anticipated a Tory wipeout in Scotland, but John Major’s late campaigning in defence of the Union rallied Conservative voters; Major stayed in power, gaining one Scottish seat, and the SNP stayed on three seats. It did, however, secure 21 per cent of the vote, Salmond claiming a “substantial advance”.
As the Maastricht Treaty came before the Commons. Labour went all out to bring Major down as Tory Eurosceptics rebelled, but Salmond felt bound to support the principle of involvement with Europe. Three of the SNP “Cabinet” resigned in protest, and Salmond narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in the party executive.
In the 1994 Euro-elections the SNP polled 33 per cent and captured one seat. After John Smith died, it cut Labour’s majority in his Monklands East constituency to 1,640. The SNP was traditionally a largely Protestant party, but Salmond now reached out to Catholics, receiving some backing within the hierarchy.
1995 brought the SNP three of 29 newly-elected councils, and a by-election gain from the Tories at Perth & Kinross. The release of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart further fuelled nationalist sentiment, prompting a move at the SNP conference to reject devolution. Salmond faced this down.
Salmond took the party into the 1997 election with its largest fighting fund ever (in the independence referendum it would be bankrolled in part by a Euromillions winner). The Conservatives were wiped out in Scotland, and the SNP gained three seats. 
Blair called a referendum on devolution and the SNP threw its weight behind the “Yes, Yes” campaign. Connery campaigned with Brown, and Salmond with the Lib Dems, delivering a 3-1 majority for a revived Scottish Parliament.
Salmond had built a good relationship with Labour’s Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar, but this did not survive his discovery that Dewar, while courting Connery, had tried to stop the actor being knighted.
He used the Commons debates on the Scotland Bill to make sure devolution went ahead, while advocating more radical change. The Spectator named him Political Strategist of the Year for 1998; in 2007 he would be its Parliamentarian of the Year.
In the run-up to the first Holyrood elections in May 1999, Salmond called for Scotland to raise income tax by 1p – as it was now empowered to do – to offset Brown’s 1p cut. This “Penny for Scotland” call did not resonate; nor did his condemning Nato’s bombing of Belgrade as “unpardonable folly”.
The SNP emerged with 35 MSPs out of 129 and 28.7 per cent of the vote, an advance on 1997 but to Salmond – elected for Banff & Buchan – a disappointment. Leading the Opposition, he came within four votes of cancelling the new Parliament building – observing that whoever won the window cleaning contract would make a fortune – but his criticisms of Dewar’s administration drew less blood than media charges that Labour had “hit the ground crawling.”
Resigning as SNP leader in September 2000, Salmond found a cause at Westminster opposing the invasion of Iraq. He claimed Blair had agreed with President Bush to go to war “come what may”, and backed Plaid Cymru moves to impeach him for having allegedly lied to the House about Saddam Hussein’s possessing weapons of mass destruction that could be used against Britain.
The SNP lost ground at the 2003 Holyrood elections, with Labour claiming devolution had seen the party off. Salmond denied any ambition to return, so when Swinney resigned in July 2004 his announcement that he would stand was a total surprise.
That September he regained the leadership, easily defeating Roseanna Cunningham. At first he led the SNP from Westminster, but after his re-election in 2005 he declared his intention to return to Holyrood.
Jack McConnell’s Labour-Lib Dem coalition had been losing ground, but the SNP’s emergence in the 2007 Holyrood elections with 47 seats to Labour’s 46 in a contest disfigured by over 100,000 spoiled ballots, stunned Scotland’s Labour establishment. Rebuffed by the Lib Dems over a coalition, Salmond, now MSP for Gordon, went it alone.
On May 16 2007 the Parliament elected him First Minister and the next day he was sworn in, also joining the Privy Council. Ms Sturgeon became his deputy, and Angus Robertson SNP leader at Westminster.
Salmond rebranded the Scottish Executive as the Scottish Government, reducing the size of the Cabinet and merging government departments. He cancelled rail links to Edinburgh and Glasgow airports, refocused spending on public services and abolished NHS prescription charges in Scotland. 
Consistently wrongfooted by Salmond, Scottish Labour went through repeated leadership crises. Likewise Salmond took advantage of Lib-Dem embarassment when one of their councillors blocked Donald Trump’s plan for a golf resort in his constituency; SNP ministers reversed the decision, though Salmond was criticised for meeting Trump’s representative beforehand. Trump was not then a serious contender for the presidency.
The Lib-Dems were expected to suffer in the 2011 Holyrood elections for going into coalition at Westminster with the Tories, and Labour under Iain Gray had high hopes of regaining power. But the SNP took 69 seats, gaining 22 from Labour and giving Salmond his mandate to stage his referendum. 
Salmond died shortly after giving a speech in North Macedonia.
The Salmonds’ marriage was childless.
Alex Salmond, born Dec 31 1954, died Oct 12 2024