He didn't say he would and he didn't say he wouldn't.

Examine the text with reasonable care and you find, in fact, that Alex Salmond announced next-to-nothing before a BBC audience in Liverpool the other night. Instead, the First Minister offered up the kind of double negative on which news from the political bubble depends: he failed to rule something out.

Mr Salmond's Question Time moment, seized with his usual relish, will have consequences in the real world, in due course. He cannot keep his party, his public, or two constituencies on tenterhooks for very much longer. In any sense that matters, the 2015 General Election campaign has already begun. So what sort of role does he hope to play?

The Scottish Nationalists harbour high but realistic hopes for next May's contest. The smart money says, meanwhile, there is a fair chance of drama in the hours and days after the count. Labour, though still with the edge in polls, struggles to persuade many that Ed Miliband resembles a prime minister. David Cameron's "long-term economic plan" is a busted flush. The LibDems are wrecked. All concerned regard the Ukip phenomenon with a mixture of fear and disgust.

As things stand, Westminster is about to enter the world of multi-party politics. While Mr Cameron wonders what to do about Nigel Farage, Mr Miliband has to contemplate a Scottish reckoning, a bloodbath that might have been designed to tempt Scotland's departing First Minister back to the Commons shark pool. And why not? For this avid student of Harold Wilson's career, there's fun to be had and work to be done.

Not for the first time, Mr Salmond is suspending the usual rules of political life. His party has just emerged on the losing side in a historic referendum. His resignation as SNP convenor and First Minister, by no means inevitable, was a plain admission of defeat for an individual, if not for a cause. Yet the same individual was quick to say that he had no intention of quitting politics. The customary route to obscurity for leaders who have missed their chance is not for him.

For the SNP, this is a problem. It happens to be a problem for which all other parties would kill, but the question "What's to be done with Alex?" involves tricky challenges. With his history of absences and arrivals in public life, with his long, unchallenged dominance of the party, with his unfulfilled ambitions and his addiction to politics, with his sheer appetite for the contest, Mr Salmond knows this better than anyone.

First issue: no one can tell him what to do. There is no appetite within the SNP to chart his course, but the effort would be a waste of time. He is too large a figure - whatever the diet sheet says - for that. Any strategy the party might adopt has to accommodate Mr Salmond's strategy. He would reckon the two to be one and the same, of course. His choice, he would insist, would always be in the best interests of the SNP. But if he is not to retire entirely, what follows?

Rocks will melt wi' the sun, in his favourite line, before he allows himself to be sedated with a peerage. There will still be finance houses and the like - French banks, once upon a time - who could use the talents of an oil economist with a political brain, but where's the buzz in that? Hubristic ventures with charitable trusts might have a noble air. They are unlikely to require all the energies of an individual who will only turn 60 on Hogmanay.

But there's the second issue. The notion Mr Salmond might simply retire to the Holyrood back benches requires a suspension of disbelief that verges on comical. Journalists would press him daily - quite right, too - for an opinion on each and every one of Nicola Sturgeon's decisions as First Minister. If a minister once faltered the party would demand that "proper use be made" of the former leader's talents and ability. The public would wonder why a real job - but which one? - was not forthcoming.

Mr Salmond is not remotely kin to William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith. That's a measure of two things. First, being on the losing side in the referendum has been the reverse of a catastrophe for the SNP. Burgeoning membership numbers and opinion poll ratings, not to mention the shambles within Scottish Labour, only begin to map the fact. This is not - anything but - a party heading for the wilderness, casting about in desperation for someone, anyone, to charge to its rescue.

Secondly, the SNP settled all those tricky succession issues long ago. John Swinney is content, even relieved, to have no hope of leading his party again. Ms Sturgeon is, and has been for years, the clear and obvious choice to succeed her friend and mentor. The one thing she needs now, though she would never say it, is to have Mr Salmond at arm's length. As the First Minister in waiting understands perfectly well, and as her departing boss understands, she must be her own person.

Westminster it is, then. It may be, as Mr Salmond informed David Dimbleby, that "absolutely decisively" he has yet to make a decision. It may be, conveniently enough, that the SNP has yet to get around to announcing its General Election candidates. It may be the media alone have settled on Gordon, where the retirement of Malcolm Bruce will leave the beleaguered LibDems defending a 6,748 majority, as a route to Westminster. But once the alternatives are eliminated, the next phase in Mr Salmond's career begins to seem obvious.

Some problems might yet await. Once again, these are problems for the SNP's rivals to envy, but they are real enough. Try this: should the party emerge from the General Election chaos as a force to be reckoned with in a hung parliament, where will real leadership lie within the Nationalists? History suggests Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon will perform a double act without difficulty or friction. Another reading would be that they have already thought this through. Nevertheless, people, especially Westminster people, will still want to know who holds the reins.

The existing SNP group in the Commons might be wondering about that too. On Question Time, in a forum he again mastered without difficulty before an appreciative Liverpudlian audience, Mr Salmond had the air of a man with plenty of unfinished business. First there is the gigantic New Model Army of the SNP; second, the Smith Commission and its distractions; third, that General Election. Westminster's difficulties are, in each case, Nationalism's opportunities.

What was obvious from the BBC broadcast this week was that any Unionist who hoped to see the last of Mr Salmond with the referendum decided was naïve. The people who once claimed an independence gradualist "didn't really want" his plebiscite in September 2014 might have struck a truth inadvertently. Why was that?

The struggling Westminster parties will not be delighted to see him back in the Commons. He'll take that, you must suspect, for starters.