The Process Is The Punishment

The magazine bubbles away in the sauce of my antidepressant. Just before he died, we had planned to offer a weekly column to Alex Salmond. We had been prepared to beg, since at least initially we were not going to be in a position to pay the kind of money that we assumed that he could and did command. Yet it transpires that Salmond died practically penniless as a result of having won his judicial review and been acquitted of all charges. But Craig Murray has lodged with an American publisher a full account to be released upon his own death. And even in The Times, Iain MacWhirter writes:

It should come as little surprise that Alex Salmond was effectively bankrupt when he died a year ago last month. Five years of litigation would drain the coffers of the most well-to-do politician, and Alex Salmond had never been in politics for the money.

He liked a flutter, of course, like the late Queen Elizabeth. His betting was minutely scrutinised by every news organisation from the BBC to The Sun. If there had been any indication of spectacular winnings, or significant gambling debts, it would have been ruthlessly exposed.

Perhaps even more ruthlessly than the alleged practices of his successor Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, who was arrested and charged with embezzlement of party funds last year — allegations which the former SNP chief executive categorically denies. At any rate, Salmond was unable to secure the lucrative publishing contracts which have bolstered many ex-politicians’ bank accounts, including, of course, that of Sturgeon. She earned £300,000 for her memoirs, which were published in the summer.

Salmond always intended to write a book, and I know for a fact that he had started one not long after his exoneration by the High Court on charges of heinous sex crimes. But at that time no publisher appeared to be interested. This may not have been unconnected with the lurid publicity that attended his high-profile court cases.

From the moment the Daily Record published that alliterative splash in August 2018 claiming that the former first minister “Touched Woman’s Breasts and Bum in Boozy Bute House Bedroom Encounter”, Salmond was firmly in the toxic masculinity box. At the time, publishers were busy cancelling Orwell-prizewinning teachers like Kate Clanchy and rewriting the work of Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl to make them more in tune with the sensibilities of the snowflake generation.

One suspects that London media luvvies regarded Salmond as a bit too like a Caledonian Harvey Weinstein, which indeed was how he was portrayed by his anonymous female accusers. And still is to this day despite his innocence being established in Scotland’s highest court.

Nor, of course, could Salmond rely on those lucrative speaking engagements that former UK prime ministers have used to line their nests. Salmond had been an oil economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland before entering politics, but he seems to have been offered no remunerative directorships. And where were those green energy companies he had promoted as one of the earliest advocates of renewables?

This is what is meant by “the process is the punishment”. When people are wrongly accused and establish their innocence in court, they are often ruined financially. The coterie of nationalist politicians and Scottish government employees who traduced Alex Salmond suffered no penalty whatsoever and were given lifetime anonymity.

That the former first minister had fought his way to victory in the highest courts in the land would, you might have thought, have made him publishing gold. In the Court of Session in January 2019, he established that the Scottish government had acted unlawfully and with apparent bias in accusing him of sexual misconduct in the first place. He won costs of £512,000 from that action, which went on legal fees. A year later, in March 2020, Salmond was acquitted of 14 charges of sexual harassment and attempted rape in the High Court.

Alex Salmond’s story would have been a compelling one, and not just because of his extraordinary legal odyssey. There was barely any recognition of his massive contribution to Scottish nationalism at last month’s SNP conference, which took place on the first anniversary of his sudden death in North Macedonia. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine the SNP being where it is today, in government for two decades, had it not been for Alex Salmond.

Before he died, Salmond made clear he intended to sue the Scottish government for about £3 million in lost earnings. He did not appear to think he was able to claim defamation, since his own admission that he was “no angel” might have led a court to regard his reputation as beyond redemption.

However, Salmond’s lawyer, Gordon Dangerfield, was seeking redress for what is called “misfeasance”: that the Scottish government acted “improperly, in bad faith and beyond their powers with the intention of injuring Mr Salmond”. Given that the Scottish government had conceded as early as January 2019 that its investigation had been unlawful, he might have been expected to win this action.

Salmond always talked about a day of reckoning over his wrongful accusations but he seemed more interested in political retribution than financial reward. Until his dying day he was incensed that no one had been held to account for the botched investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct. The permanent secretary responsible at the time, Leslie Evans, was promoted.

Salmond also wanted to establish that it was the Scottish government who leaked the original story of his alleged sexual harassment to the Daily Record. Sturgeon, in her memoirs, suggested that it was Salmond who had briefed the tabloid newspaper about the accusations levelled against him. The journalist who wrote the story, the former Daily Record political editor David Clegg, told the BBC that this was not the case.

Sturgeon made further claims about Salmond, including that he hadn’t bothered to read the 2013 Independence White Paper. She also accused him of being “prepared to traumatise, time and again, the women at the centre of [the sexual harassment allegations]”. Since these women’s accounts were rejected by a female-dominated jury sitting before a female judge, Lady Dorrian, you might have thought the more traumatised person here was Salmond himself.

And, of course, his widow, Moira — the traumatised woman everyone forgets about. She has reportedly been seeking to continue the litigation against the Scottish government. She has the support of formidable figures like the former SNP MP Joanna Cherry KC, who intends to publish her own explosive account of the Salmond affair this year.

As for Salmond himself, in time he will be accorded his rightful place in history. He was a giant figure in every sense, and the fact that he died in near-penury, while others cashed in, may only add to his posthumous mystique.