 | 'Salmond's main function will be to provide those television spots that were his trademark and which John Swinney simply couldn't deliver. Salmond has a unique ability to condense complex issues into a few vivid phrases. He doesn't need to be in Edinburgh to deliver them - just in front of a camera.' Iain MacWhirter in the Sunday Herald, 15 th August 2004. |  |
There is something oddly heroic about the SNP leadership race. Here is a trio of immensely able individuals who could walk into high-paying jobs almost anywhere, spending their summer holidays touring the damp committee rooms and meeting places of Scotland addressing endless meetings and being pursued by a hostile press. And for what? Because they want to lead a party which, however you look at it, is in deep trouble if not terminal decline.
Most people would think that they were crazy. That there must be better things to do with their precious time. But politicians are not like most people, and nor are they insane. They are, and there's no other term for it, public spirited - something which may sound stilted, pompous even, but it certainly more admirable than cynical self-interest.
Politicians are often their own worst enemies, in the way they speak and in their eagerness to please voters. But whatever your political views, you cannot help being just a little inspired by the fact that there are still people around like Alex Salmond, Roseanna Cunningham and Mike Russell, prepared to work hard for their ideals against all the odds.
I'm not sure we deserve them. Half of us don't even bother to vote in Scottish parliamentary elections. We indulge instead in modern cynicism and even contempt for politicians. But who else is going to run the country or keep an eye on the people who do? Not journalists and satirists, that's for sure. We reserve the right to sit on the sidelines and jeer at their antics while contributing next to nothing to our own culture. We make unreasonable and contradictory demands on politicians and then blame them when they don't deliver.
Of course, some politicians are self-serving careerists. In the 1990s many Tory MPs turned their elected offices into lucrative consultancies. New Labour attracts a lot of young identikit candidates, in the same suit and haircut, who probably see politics as a vehicle for their own ambitions. But people like that don't join parties as remote from power as the SNP, let alone seek to lead them.
The SNP is a million pounds in debt and has a membership that has dwindled from 50,000 to around 8000 in the last decade or so. It has had three successive election setbacks; losing one seat in the 2001 general election, eight seats in the 2003 Scottish elections and nearly being driven into third place in the 2004 European elections. It is highly likely to suffer losses in next year's general election.
The party organisation is demoralised and the SNP has lost much of its presentational flair. The celebrated by-election machine is rusty from disuse. many of its most able politicians are out of parliament altogether. Many of those who remain are embittered, divided and confused about whether the SNP's central message - independence - is still a practical possibility.
No, things couldn't get much worse. But you wouldn't have known it at the Sunday herald's hustings debate in Edinburgh last week. There were the three candidates, positively vying with each other to seize the poisoned chalice. And it's not even as if the result is really in doubt. Alex Salmond is so far ahead of Roseanna Cunningham and Mike Russell that the others might well as well pack it in now.
But they are unable to. They are driven by a passion that is as hard to understand as it is to challenge - the passion to pit their own personalities against the implacable forces of history; to pursue to the limit the career which, as Enoch Powell said, can only end in failure.
So what kind of failure will Alex Salmond make? Well, he hasn't made it any easier for himself by the circumstances of his entry into this race. On the day John Swinney resigned as leader, Salmond insisted that: 'If nominated I would decline, if drafted I would defer and if elected I would resign.' Then he changed his mind.
That carefully-honed soundbite, adapted from General Sherman's response to being asked to run for President after the American Civil War, will be hurled back at Salmond from the day he takes over in September. And not just from the opposition parties. Christine Grahame came up with her own version on Thursday. She said that if she was elected Salmond's deputy: 'I would confer with Alex, and I would refer to Alex, but I would not defer to him'. Having a leader who sits in Westminster would leave the SNP open to taunts of 'London calling', she said. The SNP deputy's job of leading the SNP at Question Time in Holyrood would be made impossible. Mike Russell said it would be like an absentee laird running his Scottish estate through his factor.
Well, with friends like these... But Alex Salmond doesn't bear grudges, and his ego is sufficiently robust not to be undermined by taunts. He is already planning how to restore people like Russell into key roles in the movement. I suspect the SNP members, as they start to cast their votes this weekend, will realise that the only option is to elect Salmond's running mate Nicola Sturgeon as deputy if they want to get back into the electoral race.
Salmond has had a relatively easy ride from the Scottish press since his surprise volte-face. But that certainly won't last, and he is braced for some pretty negative treatment. He will be cast as 'yesterday's man'. However, I don't think Salmond is likely to get the monstering he had to endure when he was leader before.
One reason Salmond packed it in in 2000 was his poor reviews after question time in Holyrood. It was said that he was regularly put in his place by Donald Dewar, that Salmond couldn't make the transition to a new parliament, that he had even lost his fluency.
Well, he won't have to bother about that for the time being, because he won't be in the Scottish parliament until 2007 at the earliest, unless he can find some MSP in a safe seat to stand down for him.
It will be odd, certainly, for the leader of the party of independence to remain in the imperial parliament. But I don't believe Salmond's authority will be fatally undermined. Nicola Sturgeon is a pretty sharp debater, and is ready to take on jack McConnell, after the why-don't-you-phone-a-friend taunts have subsided.
Salmond's main function will be to provide those television spots that were his trademark and which John Swinney simply couldn't deliver. Salmond has a unique ability to condense complex issues into a few vivid phrases. He doesn't need to be in Edinburgh to deliver them - just in front of a camera.
Anyway, the party has no realistic option. Cunningham has not bee able to show she has the presence and command to be leader right now. Russell doesn't sit in any parliament, having been rejected by the voters in 2003. Salmond is the only realistic option for the SNP, and he is prepared to take on what looks like a helpless task.
But it is not only to the party's benefit. Scottish politics has been adrift for years. Devolution has led to widespread disillusion. The only way the political culture of Scotland can be revived by political organisations is with ideas and principles - and politicians willing to lead them with imagination and flair.
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