CULTURE The loser who won
Books: Andrew Hook
Drawing by Bob Smith
‘The Dream Shall Never Die, 100 Days That Changed Scotland Forever’, by Alex Salmond (William Collins )
Alex Salmond is a divisive, polarising figure. To his many admirers, both inside and outside Scotland, he is a consummate politician, far superior to the leaders of the UK’s mainstream parliamentary parties. Given Mr Salmond’s insistence throughout the referendum campaign that the media were irredeemably biased against the cause of Scottish independence, there is a major irony in the fact that the enthusiastic promotion of the first minister’s allegedly superior political skills owed more to English commentators and correspondents than to anyone closer to home.
To his detractors, on the other hand, Alex Salmond is a smug, self-satisfied and self-centred figure, utterly confident of his superiority over his political opponents, aggressively certain that he is always right, and guilty of indulging in an uncritical form of Scottish triumphalism. Both pro- and anti-Salmond believers will find support for their cause in his book.
‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ consists of a prologue and epilogue, an introduction, what is called The Run-Up, and finally – the main body of the book – The 100 Days leading up to referendum day itself. No explanation is given for choosing this particular time span; nothing special occurred on 5 June 2014. The reality is that the referendum campaign lasted a great deal longer than 100 days. Surely it would be more accurate to say that the campaign was up and running at least from the date of the signing of what the first minister loved calling the Edinburgh Agreement of 15 October 2012.
Mr Salmond comes close to admitting as much in his introduction, where he quotes in full what he regards as the agreement’s key final clause, including as it does the statement that the two governments ‘look forward to a referendum that is legal and fair producing a decisive and respected outcome’. (Given what has happened in the post-referendum period, one wonders whether it was wise to remind us of that ‘decisive and respected’ outcome.)
More significant is his comment a few pages later on the implications of the agreed referendum question. The polls in 2012 may have looked unpromising, but the picture, he tells us, ‘was not as bleak as it might have at first appeared. The key to progress was always to be on the positive side of the argument. The referendum question – Should Scotland be an independent country? – gave us that firm platform. It is simply not possible to enthuse people on a negative’. Quite so – and the question was only one of the aspects of the agreement that naively gave an extraordinary boost to the cause of Scottish independence. In fact one may wonder whether Alex Salmond’s contribution over the next two years of campaigning achieved anything again quite as important.
He himself believes that he did a great deal more – otherwise he would not have written this book. He tells us that ‘This is my story of the last 100 days of the referendum. By definition it is a story told from my vantage point’ – which turns out to be that ‘of the leader of the campaign’. The degree to which the book is exclusively ‘my story’ will disappoint some readers. The opening sentences of The Run-Up are: ‘A game of Top Trumps with the US President. Think I may have won’. This sentiment seems to set the tone for everything that follows.
In the rest of the short entry for 5 June 2014, the first person pronoun recurs another seven times alongside six uses of ‘my’. Long sections of what follows do no more than document how Salmond is apparently winning by travelling around Scotland, delivering speeches, attending rallies, meeting sympathetic business men, celebrities, workers. We learn a surprising amount about his prowess as a golfer and his admiration for particular golf courses. There is much detail about all the sports he witnessed during the Commonwealth Games. Scottish success at wrestling and boxing is unsurprisingly given enthusiastic recognition. But the relevance of much of this material to the actual referendum campaign is far from clear.
More surprising is the lack of information on how the first minister actually led the referendum campaign. We hear about the ‘team’ in charge of day-to-day operations, but learn nothing about how it went about its business or the degree of the leader’s involvement. However on 24 June 2014 things changed. On that day Mr Salmond chaired the campaign meeting in Edinburgh. ‘The atmosphere is still down-beat’, he writes, ‘which is pretty infuriating, given that in my best estimation we are doing pretty well. Indeed we could even be doing very well. I decide to take a much stronger hand in the direction of the campaign.’
From this point on, he is increasingly confident that the tide is turning in favour of the Yes campaign. On 29 June he is reporting from Turriff that the crowd reaction is according him ‘rock-star status’. If there is any kind of fly in the ointment, it is in what he sees as the bias of the BBC’s reporting of the campaign. (This will prove to be a running theme of the book.) He had expected the press to be ‘totally biased’, but that the television would be ‘balanced’. Now he is accusing the BBC in particular of failing to report the campaign impartially. Almost two months later (26 August), commenting on the press coverage of the second TV debate with Alistair Darling, he is even prepared to argue ‘that there is a BBC conspiracy’ – aimed of course at him. As an ordinary voter, I have to say that over these days I sensed no kind of BBC bias, and to talk of the existence of a ‘conspiracy’ strikes me as utterly ludicrous.
What of the TV debates? Here is the one and only time in his 100 days that Alex Salmond admits to not being a winner. ‘Tuesday 5 August. The first TV debate. I lost.’ But wait a minute. Why did he lose? Because he had taken the advice of his ‘team’ to calm down his debating style. His only mistake was not to be true to his aggressive self. Next time ‘a very different First Minister will turn up’. And, of course, win.
In fact the book makes it clear that after his ‘win’ in the second TV debate, Alex Salmond really did believe the polls were moving in his favour, and that the Yes campaign was on course for victory. Crucial here was the degree to which enthusiastic Yes supporters had, in the words of the (biased) BBC commentator Nick Robinson, ‘claimed the streets’. On Monday 15 September, the first minister found the whole of iconic Stirling (more than once in the book he blithely compares his campaign with that of Robert the Bruce) taken over by ‘a vast mass of thousands of Yes voters and banners’. In such circumstances how could the outcome a few days later be other than a victory as significant as that of Bannockburn itself?
So what went wrong? There is a Salmond answer. The one poll giving Yes a narrow lead regrettably came a week too soon. It left time for the unionist forces to come up with Gordon Brown and the ‘vow’. Had that intervention not been made, we are asked to believe the result would have been different. A 10% difference, and only four local authorities out of 32 voting Yes? I at least am not convinced. Not that it matters, because although Alex Salmond lost (and resigned as a result) he still believes he won. Earlier on, he tells us that in ‘the aftermath of the ballot the losing Yes side have emerged looking like winners while the winning No side are looking like losers’. And surely readers must agree that: ‘After all, everyone deserves a second chance’. Or perhaps a third? Or fourth? The faithful will enjoy Alex Salmond’s referendum memoir. How many others will do so is another question.
By Andrew Hook | May 2015