Alex Salmond's death rocked me more than I could have possibly imagined

Alex Salmond used to like telling people he had known me since I had done work experience at Scotland on Sunday as a “wee lassie”, and just look at how I had come on. It was typical Salmond to embellish a story about someone else to get him a bit of a laugh.

And while many a woman might now bristle at an older man describing someone not that much younger than them as a “wee lassie” or even trying to hijack her achievements as theirs, I think it was simply his cack-handed way of saying he was proud of me.

I can’t say his joke at my expense ever bothered me. Then or now.

Neither is my memory of him tainted by the very limited prism through which many now wish to view him. I am perfectly comfortable in the knowledge that he was fond of me, and I him. And, for the record, I was always the thicker skinned.

The truth was that Alex and I met in 1992 when I was a fully-fledged, albeit still very young and relatively inexperienced, journalist working on Scotland’s fledgling Sunday broadsheet, and he was already an MP and the leader of the SNP.

The 1992 general election was his first real test as leader, and I was sent to shadow him on the campaign trail for a colour piece for the Sunday paper. And boy, could he provide colour.

This was the election in which the SNP believed, with Alex at its helm, it would make its electoral breakthrough. So, there I was travelling the north-east with him in an old minibus driven by Stewart Stevenson, along with Richard Lochhead, who worked for Salmond at the time, and Alex’s wife, Moira, who would hand out boiled sweets while giving a running commentary about the towns we passed through and make recommendations for lunch – the Udny Arms being a favourite.

The SNP didn’t make its quantum leap that election. The party went in with five MPs and ended with three. And I can still remember watching Alex on the stage at Macduff Town Hall waiting for his result, already knowing that Jim Sillars had lost Govan and that this would be a grim night for the SNP. There was no hint of what he must have felt inside. And when it was announced he had won his seat, he gave a customary punch to the air and that was it – game back on.

That was Alex. Ready to pick up the pieces and carry on. Never cowed by pessimism, never burdened by disappointment or overly bridled by trivial concerns or minor bumps in the road. He was the great optimist. He had to be. He took a party from the loony fringes of politics into government and a country to the brink of independence. He changed Scotland. He changed politics. He changed me. And that’s quite a legacy.

And yet, in the clamour for commentators to vent their loathing, there have been too many sour column inches that have framed a man’s premature death around the egos of the journalists that have penned them. Too great an appetite to rescue the words that were once filed and then spiked following a trial that didn’t give them the verdict they had prepared for. Too much haste to use his passing as the opportunity to seek revenge for a tongue-lashing or a put-down that they had never forgotten. And worse, a chance for some to jump on a bandwagon and exaggerate a relationship just to claim some plaudits in his death. This was never going to be about him when it could be about them. And frankly, it has been hard to stomach.

How you react to a moment as big as the death of a political titan like Alex says something about who you are as a person. And I am happy to admit that news of his death rocked me more than I could have possibly imagined.

It wouldn’t have been human for me to react in any other way. Upset for a life cut short with so much unfinished business. Grief for a wife who had been at times the real power behind the machine. And sorrow for a reputation that was traduced to a particular characterisation.

I hated the fact that Alex’s trial, metaphorically, put many of us in the dock. Forced into a position of having to choose. For or against, when unarmed with the facts.

And, in this binary world where nuance is absent, to then be pigeonholed either as Team Salmond or Team Sturgeon, which then extended through to views on everything from the complainants in the court case to the gender reforms and the routes to independence.

What a naïve way for life to be viewed.

But expressly on that, I have this to say: I don’t think there is a contradiction in a man who has admitted past bad behaviour towards women also believing that sex is immutable, and that women’s rights should be preserved, otherwise women may find allies in men hard to find. I don’t think you need to be a conspiracist to have serious questions about a Scottish Government process which has already been found to be flawed, penalties extracted, and information still withheld. And I don’t think you need to be a believer in deep state frame-ups to simply wonder who was the Scottish Government leak that gave a newspaper its splash on Salmond and is still to be identified.

But right now, in his death, with his family in mourning, I prefer to remember a powerhouse of a politician who helped shape many of the journalists and politicians of today who now claim some propriety over his memory, and yet decry his legacy. Alex kept us on our toes, and for some that is a further source of ire.

That 1992 election night in Macduff Town Hall was instructive. It helped me properly understand what political conviction looked like. Salmond had a resilience that was repeatedly tested but he didn’t waver, and perhaps it was that inability to be crushed that so many others found just too difficult to counter.

The dreamer has died. It is now up to others to determine whether his vision for Scotland can live on.