By David Torrance

During Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution, to which he was said to have replied that it was “too early to say”. The same might be said of Alex Salmond’s legacy, with its true impact only likely to become evident in decades to come, although certain aspects are already clear less than a year after his resignation as First Minister and SNP leader.

Strikingly, Mr Salmond altered the terms of debate, something very few politicians can lay claim to, re-orientating Scottish politics along constitutional lines, while his “gradualist” strategy, backing devolution as a “stepping stone” to independence, was fully vindicated despite often vehement internal opposition during his first period as leader in the 1990s. The professionalisation of the SNP and development of its talent pool (most notably Nicola Sturgeon) were other significant legacies.

But although often impressive as First Minister between 2007-14, Mr Salmond was perhaps best understood as an opposition politician and the SNP as an oppositionist party, more comfortable defining themselves in terms of what they were against rather than what they stood for. As a young MP in the 1980s, getting noticed required shameless opportunism and a vivid phrase contrived to grab a sub-editor’s attention, but even two decades later (after several years in government) he behaved much the same way, often opposing rather than persuading, campaigning rather than governing.

He admitted that he was “reasonably adept at defending virtually any position”, putting “a gloss on statistics or any economic figure” to build a political case. While this was true of most politicians, in Mr Salmond’s case it was a question of degree, and too often it looked as if politics to him was little more than a game and the “truth” whatever happened to work in the moment. As former Herald editor Harry Reid put it, Mr Salmond’s “high ability in the political arts” was also his “biggest weakness”, inevitably tempting him “to busk, to rely on his immense native wit rather than always attend to the tiresome detail”.

This came to a head during the independence referendum, for having created a political machine that could (and did) dominate the electoral scene in Edinburgh and London, when that machine was challenged as to what it stood for it was often found wanting. The Scotland’s Future White Paper published neatly encapsulated Salmondism: a triumph of style over substance, debating points over detailed policy.

Ironically, Mr Salmond ended up turning the SNP into what he claimed to despise, a political party that – much like Tony Blair’s New Labour – found itself guided more by political expediency and public opinion than points of principle or a radical policy agenda. By the time he resigned as First Minister and SNP leader in November 2014, Scottish political discourse was overwhelmingly characterised by displacement, externalised blame and the politics of assertion; an environment in which slick debating points trumped objective fact and self-interest could masquerade as “progressive” altruism.

While endlessly extolling the virtues of the “new politics”, more ecumenical, more prepared to accept criticisms than the old, in fact Mr Salmond gave a new lease of life to uncompromising tribalism, an alpha male mantra of “never explain, never apologise”. The SNP simultaneously constructed a big tent while shunning alternative analyses and anyone intent on pursuing a different path. Only if other visions of Scotland (on the left or right) conceded the necessity of independence were they taken seriously; thus the Marmite politician bequeathed a Marmite nation.

In doing so, paradoxically, Mr Salmond helped increase political engagement (perhaps the referendum did that, but then without him there would have been no referendum). No matter how great the intellectual contortions, something about him induced increasing numbers of Scots to give him the benefit of the doubt, attracted by his opposition to austerity, Thatcherism and Euroscepticism and willing to believe he would come up with something better; what the academic James Mitchell called a “debilitating oppositional grievance culture masquerading as radicalism”. While frequently revealing himself to be every bit as cynical and opportunist as those he demonised, Mr Salmond managed to convince voters that somehow he was different, that he would deliver where lesser mortals invariably failed.

In what was widely accepted as the age of apathy, that was no mean feat. Nevertheless, when it came to Mr Salmond, Enoch Powell’s aphorism certainly held: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” Having spent a political lifetime building support for himself, the SNP and, eventually, independence, Mr Salmond arguably ended up squandering the remarkable opportunity he had worked so hard to create. Analysis showed that the majority No vote had little to do with “the Vow” (as he chose to believe) and rather more to do with economics. Thus the Yes proposition foundering upon a “currency union”, the risk of capital flight and broader economic uncertainty represented a weakness inseparable from the man himself. He was both the sine qua non of the independence referendum, but also its Achilles heel.

:: A fully revised and updated version of David Torrance's book Salmond: Against the Odds is available from Birlinn.