HOW ROLES CAN BE REVERSED.

Reproduced from an Iain MacWhirter article published originally in The Times. It deserves a wide audience in Scotland as the process described in my headline still has some distance to travel.

Sunday July 16 2023, 6.00pm BST, The Times

As Alex Salmond rose to deliver the eulogy to the late Winnie Ewing in Inverness Cathedral on Saturday you could practically hear the teeth of certain members of the audience grinding all the way from Edinburgh. Nicola Sturgeon, sitting stony faced, had to listen to this man — THIS man — cover himself in the reflected glory of Madame Écosse! How is he even here, she must have thought, after being denounced by his own defence advocate as a bully and a pest and admitting that he has been “no saint”? He isn’t even in the SNP any more.

Moreover, you couldn’t help reading his eulogy as a veiled critique of Sturgeon’s conduct as leader. Salmond told the SNP mourners that Winnie stood as “a reminder to all of us, that real success in politics does not come easily, it is born out of decades of work and must never, ever be taken for-granted”. Nudge nudge. Winnie showed, he went on, that “you don’t have to hold high office to achieve something. Just as you can hold office and achieve nothing”. Mentioning no names.

Nicola Sturgeon may insist that she won eight elections straight, but what did she actually deliver? The SNP values progress to independence above all and many of those in the Inverness gathering think she squandered the succession of “mandates” won at those elections. For all his personal failings Salmond did actually achieve something — he “moved the dial” on independence, to use the current cliché.

That is what the SNP thinks leaders are for, not just being there, holding high office. Salmond was the first SNP leader to win a parliamentary general election, becoming first minister in 2007. He went on to win a landslide victory in 2011 and then negotiated the Edinburgh agreement of 2012 that paved the way for the first independence referendum. He didn’t do badly in that either.

Whatever you thought of his politics, Salmond was a brilliant campaigner and an insurgent politician who could never regard politics as an exercise in cautious party management. At least, that is the story he has now written for himself. Salmond has even had the cheek to start his new TV show, Scotland Speaks, this week without the help of Russia Today. As presenter, Salmond isn’t going to give Martin Geissler any sleepless nights, but the show could become a potent vehicle for criticising Sturgeon’s legacy.

Nicola Sturgeon by contrast is now regarded by many in the party as a failure who plunged the SNP into needless chaos by resigning in a fit of pique in February and then turning the SNP into an episode of Line of Duty. The party is alive this week to rumours that charges are imminent in Operation Branchform, the police investigation into the alleged misdirection of party funds. No one knows for certain, of course, but people following this extraordinary criminal investigation closely expect Police Scotland to bring it to a conclusion shortly. Make of that what you will.

It is, anyway you look at it, an extraordinary reversal of fortune. Alex Salmond was of course charged with 14 counts including sexual harassment and attempted rape three and a half years ago. His accusers included members of the Scottish government and senior SNP politicians, some of whom might even have been listening to his eulogy in Inverness Cathedral. Salmond was acquitted of all charges, but only after a bruising trial in which his character was torn apart. Afterwards no one thought he could ever return to active politics, let alone become a respected figure in the independence movement once more.

Well, times change. The tables have turned and most of his detractors are now history. The figure he accused of organising a “deliberate, prolonged, malicious” campaign to have him jailed, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, is now the one who has been disgraced and thrown from public life. It’s an incredible tale. It is also the story of the deep crisis of the Scottish National Party and the foundering of the independence movement.

The feud between Salmond and Sturgeon was more than just the falling out of two powerful personalities. It started the SNP’s slide into chaos and division. While it didn’t immediately damage the SNP’s electoral performance, it shattered the confidence of the membership in the leadership of the party. The magic had gone. We can trace the SNP’s decline from January 2019 and Salmond’s victory in the Court of Session which ruled that the Scottish government had acted “unlawfully . . . and with apparent bias” in condemning him in the first place.

The affair left Nicola Sturgeon increasingly dependent on the coterie of admirers and yay-sayers in her inner circle who had stuck with her after the disaster of Salmond’s judicial review and the subsequent trial. The party turned into a monolithic machine run by the duopoly of Sturgeon and her husband, the party chief executive, Murrell. It lost touch with its membership and then lost the plot. Today it is almost visibly falling apart.

A succession of MPs seem to have had it with the SNP, including the veteran Angus MacNeil, the former SNP member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar. He now says the party leadership has been “clueless”. Seven others in the SNP Westminster group of MPs including the former Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, and the recently appointed deputy leader, Mhairi Black, have abandoned their seats. You’d think fighting elections had gone out of fashion.

It is hard to believe that only six months ago the SNP still dominated Scottish politics at every level and that Nicola Sturgeon was unchallenged as leader — until she pulled the plug. She must be seething now seeing her bête noire restored to the SNP pantheon while she seems on the way to pariah status, fending off calls for her resignation. Alex Salmond has been allowed to rewrite his own history — become the architect of his rehabilitation.

The difference between Salmond and Sturgeon, it turns out, is that she is a quitter and he — like Winnie Ewing — isn’t. Salmond may never again be a serious contender for leadership of the movement, but it doesn’t matter. Campaigning is his life; what he does. He won’t stop — can’t stop — until he becomes, like Winnie, a part of nationalist history and when another leader, perhaps Stephen Flynn, is delivering his eulogy.

MY COMMENTS

The above article highlights that no matter how powerful you might think you are, how untouchable, you need to be wary that such power is not held forever and that times can, and do transpire, that change all that.

It makes it important to stay away from vindictive plots and anything that can prove highly dubious or worse when light is shone on what went on. By now the intended plan of a surgical strike on the victim with the plotters making a clean getaway, protected by a court delivered lifetime anonymity benefit, lies in tatters as huge numbers through word of mouth know exactly who they were and how close they were to the very top of the SNP.

This knowledge compounded by the police investigation into dubious financial management has well and truly tarnished Nicola Sturgeon’s carefully self managed image.

This is a tragedy because given the opportunity she was handed, ironically by Alex SAlmond, she could have been the leader to deliver Independence. Instead as the writer of the above article states she is now well on the way to “pariah status”.

I am, as always

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