Salmond’s attempt at comeback bodes ill for Sturgeon and SNP

The video connection was unstable and the audience smaller than he used to command, but when Alex Salmond strode back on to Scotland’s political stage on Friday it was with a blast of the bombastic rhetoric at which the former first minister has always excelled.

“We’re hoisting the flag, we are staking our Saltire on the hill, we are appealing to people to rally in support,” Salmond said at an event to launch his new pro-independence party, Alba. “I believe that people will rally to that standard.”

The new party marked Salmond’s attempt to return to the political front line after a “nightmare” three years since he was accused by two civil servants of sexual harassment — and a new chapter in his bitter rift with his successor as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

By competing with Sturgeon’s ruling Scottish National party for so-called regional list votes in crucial elections to the Edinburgh parliament on May 6, Salmond said Alba could achieve a pro-independence “supermajority” that would strengthen the case for separation from the UK.

But analysts said this attempt to exploit the electoral system would be hard to pull off and could end up making it easier for the UK government to refuse the SNP’s demand for a referendum on Scottish independence.

Salmond quit as first minister and SNP leader after Scots rejected independence in a referendum in 2014.

The return of Salmond, who in recent weeks has accused Sturgeon of breaching the ministerial code and her closest associates of plotting to drive him from public life, also threatens to cast a long shadow over the governing party’s election campaign.

“It’s probably the last thing the SNP would want,” said Mark Diffley, a consultant on Scottish public opinion.

SNP members have long feared the fallout from the extraordinary rift between Salmond and Sturgeon and from revelations of serious flaws in the way the Scottish government handled the 2018 sexual harassment complaints against him.

In 2019 the government was forced to concede in court that its investigation had been unlawful because it was “procedurally unfair” and “tainted by apparent bias”. At a criminal trial last year, Salmond was acquitted of all 13 sexual offence charges against him.

Sturgeon has dismissed Salmond’s accusations that SNP officials colluded against him as a wild conspiracy theory and an independent investigation by her adviser on the ministerial code, former top Irish prosecutor James Hamilton, this week cleared her of any breach of it.

So far the affair does not seem to have badly dented support for the SNP, with Salmond citing a Survation survey for The Courier newspaper published this week that put the party far ahead of its rivals in both constituency and regional list voting intentions for the Scottish parliament elections.

Scots get two votes in the elections, with the first cast for a candidate to represent a constituency. The second vote is placed for a party so as to elect candidates from a regional list.

Survation’s opinion poll suggested the SNP would take the vast majority of constituency seats on May 6, meaning the party would be allotted very few more from the regional lists and so — as Salmond put it — second votes for it would be “wasted”.

Damian Lyons Lowe, Survation chief executive, said that if five percentage points of the SNP’s current support on the regional lists went to Alba and the new party took two points from the Scottish Greens, then the projected pro-independence majority in the 129-seat parliament would go from 78 to 83.

But other analysts cautioned that Salmond might struggle to get the roughly 6 per cent share of the vote needed to win a regional list seat.

“He’s set himself a fair old challenge,” said John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde university, adding that Alba’s success would depend mainly on whether voters preferred his brand of nationalism or that of Sturgeon, who enjoys much higher approval ratings in polls.

“I look at how popular is Mr Salmond and I do not find a very popular politician,” said Curtice.

One recent poll suggested that only 10 per cent or so of SNP voters trust Salmond, making it potentially difficult to persuade them to give him even one of their votes, said Diffley. “He’s fishing in a pretty small pool,” he added.

Despite Salmond’s acquittal on all the criminal charges, his reputation has been damaged by revelations of what his lawyer acknowledged at his trial was “inappropriate” behaviour toward women. He himself said in court that he had had consensual sexual contact with much younger and more junior female colleagues at his official residence in Edinburgh.

At his party launch, Salmond waved aside all questions about his conduct, suggesting that following his court challenge to the Scottish government’s investigation, the criminal trial and various other inquiries, the issue was settled.

“It seems a good time to accept what’s been said . . . and to move on and to debate the future of Scotland,” he said.

His former comrades are unwilling to move on. A tart SNP statement on Friday said Salmond’s conduct had raised “real questions” about his fitness for public office.

And some in the party were harsh in their assessment of Salmond’s new venture. “To go from taking Scotland to the brink of independence and a period where he was master of all he surveyed, to this cranky [Nigel] Farage-style outfit . . . is quite the downfall,” tweeted Stewart McDonald, an SNP MP.

Curtice said the SNP would be right to worry that even if Salmond’s new party did not win a seat on May 6, it could take enough votes to deny the SNP a majority in its own right. That would make it easier for Boris Johnson to reject its calls for a second independence referendum.

“He is at risk of denying the SNP an overall majority,” said Curtice. “And some of us take the view that whether or not the SNP get a majority on their own is much more important than how many pro-independence [members of the Scottish parliament] there are in Holyrood.”