DID you catch RT yesterday? No? Still quaintly attached to the notion that the news is only worth your time if it aims to be truthful and proportionate?

Poor you – you’re missing out. Fiction is so much more comforting.

This was the picture in Ukraine just after 9am on February 24, according to the Kremlin misinformation network: “Russia’s goal is to bring justice to those who have committed numerous crimes against civilians, including Russians” (studio anchor); Putin’s aim was “to protect people from Kiev’s genocide” (another falsehood). And this, from Vlad’s big book of conspiracy theories: “Russia will not allow Ukraine to have nuclear weapons”.

On RT, the great Russian bear is being cruelly victimised by a Ukrainian rat.

It's an incontrovertible fact that Russia had just invaded a sovereign state without justification, but on RT that was presented as just a Nato point of view.

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Then came the attempts to cause panic and despondency. The situation was “desperate” for the Ukrainian government, we were told. A Russian Ministry of Defence claim to have detected “mass desertions” among the Ukrainian military was excitedly repeated.

There was no mention of the seven deaths caused by shelling that the Ukrainian police were by then reporting.

No mention of the queues of traffic as civilians tried to flee the violence.

No mention of Ukrainian civilians, including children, hiding underground.

That’s RT. Was that snapshot of coverage unique, a momentary lapse of editorial judgment in the heat of the moment? Of course not: this is what sophisticated modern propaganda looks like. The tone of RT is like that of a news channel but it’s anything but. The word “unconfirmed” is chucked in every so often as a flimsy figleaf to hide the reporting of falsehoods. It leaves you feeling faintly sick, this great lie machine. It’s repellent stuff.

It’s hosted Alex Salmond’s chat show for years.

He has now announced it will be suspended temporarily ‘until a peace is re-established’. However RT and other instruments of misinformation have long been used in Russia’s campaign to destabilise its opponents. Indeed, as the attack unfolded, RT made space online for Mr Salmond’s latest show. How proud he must have felt.

But it’s way too late to save his battered credibility. A year ago, it looked as if the exposure of Mr Salmond’s distasteful behaviour as First Minister would be his undoing, and it did indeed undermine him: his personal poll ratings still languish somewhere near the bottom of the Mariana Trench and his Alba vanity project bombed at the Holyrood polls last year. 

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But his defiant association with RT brings a different sort of ignominy. As a serious politician, his reputation is not faring well. He may remain on the fringes, a discredited and diminished figure, but he will be treated with contempt.

Mr Salmond will find little to comfort him in the argument that politicians of other parties also appear on the channel. Together with Mr Salmond, George Galloway and Nigel Farage have also been RT regulars. What a trio: the axis of awful.

The facts are damning. There can be no excuse for a former senior politician to have taken a major presenting role on RT in 2017, at the height of the controversy about Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, and holding onto it even when Russian Novichock nerve agent poisoned five people, killing one, on UK soil.

(Mr Salmond isn’t the only one of yesterday’s men who has scandalously mislaid his judgment: yesterday morning, his guest was none other than former Lib Dem leader Vince Cable. )

How does this happen? How does a man who became First Minister by broadening the democratic appeal of the SNP, end up disregarding public opinion to the extent that he takes the rouble from an organ of the Russian state?

It has a strong whiff of ego and entitlement about it. Perhaps he feels that the world should not be denied his fathomless wisdom; that if the much-maligned mainstream media will not platform him any more, then he must find other ways to proclaim his hallowed views.

How painfully reminiscent that is of Donald Trump, who only this week launched his own version to Twitter, after being banned from the real thing last year. Losing political power in a democracy used to mean fading into obscurity, or having to build credibility in a fresh role. But thanks to the explosion of new media, ex-politicians unconstrained by electoral considerations can now bathe their egos endlessly in the public spotlight, haunting their successors like the political undead.

Bowing out gracefully is out of fashion. Of course, nowhere is this demonstrated as starkly as in the current UK government of Boris Johnson, where Priti Patel has hung on despite breaking the ministerial code, Tory ministers tried to stop MP Owen Paterson being suspended even though he had brought the house into disrepute by lobbying and Boris Johnson himself defied public opinion to stay in office in spite of all the Downing Street parties. He’s reportedly insisted that he won’t resign even if found guilty by police of a criminal offence.

The Tories are serial offenders, but there is a political culture developing across the world where, if the truth is inconvenient, it is brushed aside; ignored. The truth and what is right are under constant attack. And it’s precisely that confusion about what’s right and where the truth lies that RT is trying to foster.

Alex Salmond perhaps tells himself that he has a historic role still to play on the public stage due to his differences with Nicola Sturgeon over the best route to achieving independence, but it’s too late. That will be someone else’s fight. He is too damaged. At the time of his trial in 2020, his own QC described him in an overheard conversation as an “objectionable bully to work with”. A few months later, the former permanent secretary Sir Peter Housden said the former FM had been known for “bullying and intimidatory behaviour”.

Mr Salmond was acquitted on all charges of sexual assault, but Nicola Sturgeon has criticised him for showing no contrition for the inappropriate behaviour a number of women felt he showed them.

That has all left a mark. And for the past four years, he’s worked for a propaganda channel that seeks to shore up the position of a murderous regime in Moscow. RT is so dangerous that it has united the Tories, Labour and the SNP in calls to have it banned.

Enough. It’s over. Mr Salmond, your time in the limelight should have been up long ago. We don’t want you there and we don’t need you – not any more.

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