You had to think carefully before taking on Salmond
"What’s Alex Salmond really like?" If I had a penny for every time I have been asked this question...
As the independence issue climbed to the top of the news, so former constituents have quizzed me ever more closely: "Is it going to happen – is Alex Salmond really going to take Scotland out of the United Kingdom?"
It is probably the case that during my time in Holyrood I was the one MSP who went furthest back with Alex Salmond – and it all starts with the 1977 official photograph of the St Andrews University Students Representative Council (SRC).
In it I am sitting on the ground beside Des Swayne (now a Conservative MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, David Cameron), and sitting between us is himself – Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond.
Thin of frame and pale of countenance, physically he cut a very different figure back then. The official university gown of his position as Education Vice-President is worth contrasting with the rather more whimsical flower in my buttonhole.
There we are – and it is a curious quirk of fate that the only three (out of the 36 student politicians) in the picture who were to go on and eventually become members of parliament should be sitting together in this tight little triangle.
When the journalist David Torrance recently interviewed me for his biography, Salmond – Against the Odds, he asked me what my first impressions of Salmond were before he became big in student politics. I remember humming and hawing, and then having to confess that I had no idea. You see, Salmond’s rise was like no other.
It was almost Mephistophelean, almost with a theatrical rumble and flash, that a hitherto virtually unknown Salmond suddenly appeared amongst the collection of lefties, Hooray Henrys, and everything else in between, that made up the St Andrews University SRC.
One of the most important things to know about Salmond’s early political days is that he leapt onto the stage a fully formed political heavyweight. While some of us were still getting used to the idea of having left behind school, Salmond was more grown-up, more knowing, and more eloquent in the way he made his first steps in politics – and always packaged with charm and wit, and, when needed, menace.
Whatever background alchemy forged the fully-equipped adult Salmond, the task was brilliantly finished years before many of the rest of us. Even as the smoke of his first appearance cleared, he was already dominating the debate.
Thinking of the Salmond that I knew later when I was an MSP, I can clearly see that he was little different to the Salmond of 1977. This surely contrasted with me and the afore-mentioned Desmond Swayne MP (who many students thought of as being borderline insane in 1977).
He was aloof too. As students have a predilection for late nights, so too nearly every SRC meeting went on into the wee small hours – and one of my clearest memories is of the final bang of the gavel "Meeting closed!" and groups of us heading to the back doors of the St Andrews bakers for the first hot bread straight from the oven. It tasted wonderful as the first light crept over the eastern horizon.
Salmond was never part of this: and nor did he join in with those groups of the SRC who chose to refresh themselves with tray-loads of student union beer that we took it in turn to go down and buy in the bowels of the building.
It would be wrong to suggest that Salmond was puritanical, he enjoyed a joke, although there was usually a political edge to it.
"Yes, well, what I would like to say is..." at this Salmond would swing round and fix the intrepid (hapless?) speaker with a glittering eye, an eye that missed nothing, virtually bored right through you and the bricks of the wall behind you.
You had to think carefully before you decided to take on this man. His excoriating verbal sallies and ripostes were more than menacing, they could draw real blood. A quick smile and a cheerful word – they both hid a rapier.
A man that was uniquely talented; both alluring and frightening at the same time – and would go very far indeed – that was how I saw him until the day I stepped onto the stage of the Younger Hall where I had part of John Knox’s trousers placed on my head and collected my degree.
It was to be 22 years before our paths crossed again – in 1999 in the Scottish Parliament.
(Continued next week)
