“We gather not to beatify a saint, but to remember a human being.” With these words the reverend George Whyte opened the public memorial service for Alex Salmond on St Andrew’s Day this November, in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh.
Whyte’s words were a strange reminder—uttered as they were inside a building that was once the cockpit of the Scottish Reformation—of a time when saints, sacraments and any other mediatory influence that might interfere with the “word of God” were cast out of the national creed with great fervour. But they can also be read as a subtle reference to Salmond’s own admission, at the outset of his legal battles with the government he once led over allegations of sexual misconduct, that he was “no saint”.
Few politicians possess the self-confidence to offer such clarifications. But Salmond, born on Hogmanay 1954 in the ancient burgh of Linlithgow, was possessed of a charisma that could not be tamed.
In another time, or in another country, history might have elevated Salmond to the secular forms of sainthood that modern nation states now revere: the liberator, the martyr, the revolutionary founder.
Instead, Salmond’s memorial service—a state funeral without a state—got underway on Saturday with that most Scottish question, “What might have been?” still hanging in the air.
Outside St Giles’, on the Royal Mile, a few hundred supporters of Salmond jammed up against tourists to pay their respects. They waited as another cast of hundreds made their way inside the cathedral. Occasionally the supporters clapped, reserving their boos and shouts of “traitor” for John Swinney, Salmond’s close friend and current successor as first minister.
Here was the reminder of a cruel irony. The civic and inclusive contemporary movement for Scottish independence that Salmond helped to build more than any other individual, is now defined by factionalism and recrimination. After the founding of his electorally insignificant Alba party in 2021, Salmond—exiled from an SNP that he had taken to previously undreamed of heights—marched his most devoted followers, Moses-like, back into the wilderness.
The mix of 500 guests invited by Salmond’s family was nothing if not eclectic, from veteran Tory backbencher David Davis to trade unionist Len McCluskey. Of the five living former first ministers, only Labour’s Henry McLeish was in attendance. Two others—Salmond’s erstwhile protégées Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf—were conspicuously, but inevitably, absent.
The increasingly acrimonious fallout within the independence movement following the Scottish government’s failed bid for statehood in 2014 can obscure the astonishment that Salmond’s political achievements once provoked among the British political class at large.
To say that Alex Salmond made history doesn’t quite cut it. Reared on tales of Scottish history, Salmond lived and breathed his country’s past. At the core of his political genius was the recognition that there was something more to the revival of Scottish culture and national identity in the late 20th century than mere kitsch or sentimentality. Instead, Salmond saw a desire to take the long-suppressed possibility of statehood and make something new with it.
He did this at a time when the past was something that sensible politicians were expressly not supposed to take seriously. In the era in which Salmond reached political maturity—the 1990s—history was said to have ended, its mess and chaos tidied up and carted off stage. Dreams became things to be consumed, rather than voted for.
“He was one of the greatest Scots of all time,” the firebrand 87-year-old former deputy leader of the SNP, Jim Sillars, told me as he left the cathedral. A besuited Bruce or Wallace? These blood-soaked characters bear no comparison with a man who mounted Edinburgh Fringe shows, not barricades. Yet for some, Salmond’s heroism is undimmed. “He’s done the most of anyone in 300 years to unshackle us,” claimed one of his supporters waiting outside.
Who, in the end, gets to make history? A few hundred yards away from the steps of St Giles’ in Parliament Hall, home of the ancient parliament of Scotland, a deeply unpopular Treaty of Union was ratified on 16th January 1707; an establishment stitch-up for the ages. St Giles’ also has a strong claim to be the place where the Wars of the Three Kingdoms began, after one congregant threw a stool at the minister for attempting to impose King Charles I’s new Book of Common Prayer. A riot ensued, lighting the touchpaper of popular upheaval which ultimately ended in regicide and, half a century later, the establishment of religious and civil liberties.
“He called people to a cause in which he believed” and “challenged the status quo”, reflected Whyte of Salmond, who some now hope will be remembered as the next great man in the line of great men that make up Scottish history. But then again, history, as Salmond himself knew intimately, doesn’t always work out the way we hope or expect. Locals continue to believe that it was a working-class woman, Jenny Geddes, who threw the stool.
