The man who would break up the United Kingdom

By Alex Perry

A bitter March wind is whistling off the Clyde, hurrying the last few commuters onto their trains at Glasgow Central Station, but a floor above, in the golden ballroom of the Grand Central Hotel, the man who would tear the United Kingdom apart is bathing in a warm glow of love.
"Alex," says a middle-aged woman at the front, trying not to cry, "you took the nation into your hands. You helped us go forward. When we lost, I went up to your house and sat there for an hour and a half, crying my eyes out..."
"Oh, Alex," says a neatly suited man in a trembling voice, "September 19th was such a day of heartbreak. How did you find the strength and resources to come back?"
"Alex," shouts a young woman at the back, holding up a phone, "can you say happy birthday to me nan?"
Tonight's event is to launch Alex Salmond's book, The Dream Shall Never Die, based on a 100-day diary he kept during the 2014 referendum campaign on Scottish independence. Salmond and his Scottish National Party (SNP) lost that vote 55.3% to 44.7%. Yet tonight he is putting on a winner's performance. Walking off stage into the audience, he draws them into a huddle to tell them about the day, 19 September 2014, that he lost the vote for independence and resigned as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP. He and his wife, Moira, bade goodbye to his staff and caught a helicopter home to the small northern Scottish town of Strichen, where the couple live in a converted mill on the edge of the Highlands. The pair left Edinburgh, he says, in bright evening sunshine and flew north up Scotland's icy coast. As they passed Dundee, into Salmond's head came Robert Burns's reworking of an old Jacobite song, Bonnie Dundee:
Then awa' to the hills, to the lea, to the rocks,
E'er I own a usurper, I'll couch wi' the fox!
Then tremble, false Whigs, in the midst o' your glee,
Ye ha' no seen the last o' my bonnets and me.
Salmond reads the poem quietly. The audience cranes in to hear. As he speaks the last, defiant line, they erupt in a swell of clapping, stomping and yelling that lasts a full minute. When the applause finally dies, Salmond tells them how Dundee gave him the seminal moment of his political life. He is canvassing in the city when he comes across a queue of hundreds of people registering to vote. Many are doing so for the first time in their lives. "This is the first time there has been anything worth voting for," a man tells Salmond.
This is for what Salmond has worked for 40 years. Finally, the longed-for Scottish Awakening is happening. He compares it to the dawn of black freedom in South Africa 20 years before, at the first free election after apartheid, when people queued for hours to exercise their right to vote.
He wipes away a tear. "The country which started the referendum campaign is not the same Scotland we are living in now," he says. "The people who emerged are different from those who embarked on this journey. They are more energised, more mobilised. That's why they are likely to take the first opportunity to move this country forward."
Salmond stares out at the audience, then looks up.
"And it's coming soon!" he roars.
Holding the balance
Scotland's opportunity is coming, in fact, on 7 May. Polls ahead of this year's British general election suggest the two main British parties, the ruling Conservatives and opposition Labour, will each attract only around a third of voters' support, leaving both short of the parliamentary majority they need to form a government.
The same scenario presented itself at the last election in 2010. Then the Conservatives linked up with the third-biggest party, the Liberal Democrats. This time around, the peculiarities of the British voting system should mean the range of potential partners is wider. The Scottish nationalists, for instance, are projected to win just 4% of the total vote, behind the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Right-wing UK Independence Party (Ukip).
But because Westminster is elected constituency by constituency and because the SNP's support is not dispersed across Britain but concentrated on the mere 8% of the population who live in Scotland, the SNP should win around four-fifths of the 59 Scottish seats. That would make one of the least electorally popular parties in Britain the third largest in its parliament and a likely kingmaker for any would-be government.
And that means, nine months after he quit, that Alex Salmond is back.
Salmond is now standing for election as a Westminster MP for the Aberdeenshire constituency of Gordon. While his protégée Nicola Sturgeon, as the new First Minister of the SNP, is the official face of the election, Salmond is likely to lead the tartan bloc in any post-election negotiations. He has already ruled out any deal with the Conservatives. To Labour, he has made clear his preference for an informal centre-Left alliance, a Labour government that the SNP would support in parliament on a vote-by-vote basis, with possible further backing from other centre-Left parties like the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, the Irish nationalist Sinn Féin, plus the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.
The prospect of a Left-leaning London government beholden to Scottish nationalists fills more southern, more Right-wing and altogether more English Brits with dread and fury. Three days after his Glasgow book launch, Salmond is in London to tell a BBC interviewer: "If you hold the balance, you hold the power."
Asked to respond, plummy Conservative minister Anna Soubry all but chokes on her outrage. "I've met Alex a few times and he seems to be a very charming man," she says. "But [what he says] is absolutely terrifying. The thought that we are in a position whereby you [Salmond] could be actually controlling, in the way you have described, this United Kingdom fills me with absolute horror. The audacity is astonishing! There was a wonderful debate in Scotland. You lost it! We're a United Kingdom. [And] you guys are now in the position whereby you would be the power-broker."
Salmond smiles. "So we haven't lost after all, then," he says.
"Exactly!" exclaims Soubry. "It's a back-door way of breaking up the Union!"
"It's actually sort of daft," says Salmond. "I wanted Scotland to be independent. I wanted to leave Anna to her own devices in the House of Commons. She wanted us in the House of Commons. And now she's complaining that we're going to have too many seats!"
In a week with Salmond on his book tour and the campaign trail around Scotland and London, his "visceral contempt" for the southern British elite emerges as a favourite theme. In Glasgow, he pokes fun at the arrogance of "the Westminster Establishment". "The votes at Westminster will not be in the usual hands, and they absolutely hate it," he says. "'What an awful thought! That Salmond guy here!'"
It's the sort of fiery underdog talk that delights his audience. "Wasn't that fookin' brilliant, eh?!" says a supporter at the bar afterwards. "So fookin' gallant and fookin' Scottish and fookin' cheeky bastard!"