Alex Salmond: The next King of Scotland?

The story goes that Alex Salmond had a student girlfriend called Debbie Horton, back in 1973, who supported Labour. He had grown up on a Linlithgow council estate, and thought of himself as Labour too, but at the culmination of a heated argument, she exclaimed: "If you feel like that, go and join the bloody SNP."

So he did. In no time, he was president of the Scottish Nationalist Students. The SNP thus gained one of the most effective leaders they have ever had, the man who is being called the Next King of Scotland.

Salmond is not necessarily the nicest man who ever joined the SNP. Words like "unpleasant" and "vindictive" seem to spring to the lips of people who have seen his ruthless side. One Labour-supporting Scot, who has known him for 20 years, said: "I don't know anybody who says that Alex Salmond is a nice guy."

But he is the SNP's best political operator, and the shrewdest politician in Scotland outside the Labour Party. He is the master of memorable phrases, a man who commands attention when he speaks, an expert at gladhanding and working the room, and a seasoned political street fighter. If Labour ceases next week to be Scotland's dominant political party, for the first time almost in living memory, that will to a considerable extent be down to the political skills of the man from Linlithgow, who resembles a hamster but has a sharper bite.

Salmond combines left-wing politics with an authoritarian style of party management, suggesting that he learnt something from his father, a civil servant whose views were so Stalinist that he was known in his navy days as Uncle Joe. His mother was a Churchillian Conservative. His main political influence in childhood seems to have been his grandfather Sandy Salmond, a Linlithgow plumber.

At school, he had a line in cheek which earned him a belting once, for making farmyard noises in class. He also showed promise as a boy soprano.

At the University of St Andrews, he received his first taste of political defeat, running as SNP candidate for the student presidency. He gave a foretaste of the aggressive style he has used in national politics by referring to his Tory opponent, Peter Bainbridge, throughout the campaign as Peter "Braindamage". To Salmond's lasting chagrin, "Braindamage" won.

After university, Salmond went to work for the civil service, and for the Royal Bank of Scotland. When he was 26, he married a civil servant, Moira McLashan, who was then 43. They have no children, and it is said that Salmond is not comfortable around children. Moira Salmond has kept out of the public eye, though she is said to be a source of shrewd advice for her husband. Now nearly 70, she may find that she cannot escape public scrutiny, as her husband steps nearer to his ambition to be the first head of government of an independent Scotland.

As a young SNP activist, Salmond was seen as suspiciously left-wing by the party "Tartan Tory" leadership. He was expelled in 1982, but readmitted a year later as his views on economics became less socialist. In 1987, he won Banff and Buchan constituency, around Peterhead, which he has held ever since. He led the SNP through the period when the Scottish Assembly came into being. In 2000, he suddenly resigned the leadership, then gave up his seat in the Scottish Assembly, apparently content to be a backbencher in the Commons.

When his successor, John Swinney, resigned in the wake of poor election results in 2004, it was expected that Salmond would back his ally, Nicola Sturgeon, to take over. However, it was beginning to look as if she was going to lose to Swinney's former deputy, Roseanna Cunningham, so Salmond dramatically announced that he was entering the race to reclaim his old job. He won convincingly, with Sturgeon as his deputy, leaving the Scottish Nationalists in the peculiar position of having a leader whose parliamentary seat was in London, not Edinburgh.

One of the reasons his decision to return to seek the leadership caused such surprise was because he had been so emphatic in saying that he would never go back to it. "If nominated, I'll decline," he had said. "If drafted I'll defer. And if elected I'll resign."

Within a month of saying those words, he was back in Aberdeen launching his campaign, in the very same hall where he had announced four years earlier that he was quitting. A lesser man might have had to admit that he had had a rather dramatic change of mind, but not Alex Salmond. In his case, it was the worlds that had changed.

"Time and circumstances change," he said. "I did not anticipate that after waiting 300 years for a Scottish Parliament that it would allow itself to sink so swiftly into something approaching disrepute. I did not expect that such a failing Labour Party with such mediocre leadership would have been able to cling to power in the face of such a changing political landscape."

In a media age, Salmond is the Scottish nationalist people recognise. He is the one who can come up with bitingly memorable comments, such as the question he asked of Tony Blair about the cash of peerages allegations: "You're known for your association with George W Bush, but given all that has befallen the Prime Minister's men and women in recent days, is not the more relevant association with President Richard Milhouse Nixon?"

Even now, he seems to be willing to risk not getting back into the Scottish Assembly. He is contesting Gordon, where the SNP came third in the last round of Scottish Assembly elections, 4,500 behind the Lib Dems, when there are more than a dozen safer seats he could have chosen. Salmond is a gambler. His fondness for the horses is no secret, and there have been times in his career when journalists have been sent to investigate rumours of heavy debts to the bookies, only to draw a blank.

But in this case, he may feel that it is a gamble in which he has nothing to lose, because for Salmond, success next week means all or nothing. The SNP needs to take 20 seats from Labour and the Liberal Democrats to secure a dominant position, having taken 27 last time, to a combined total of 67 for the Labour and Lib Dems. Gordon is 18th on their target list. If they take Gordon, they will probably control the Assembly, and, conversely, if they are still in opposition after 3 May, Salmond will probably have lost in Gordon. He will either return as the man who controls the Assembly, or not at all.

In a career marked by numerous ups and down, Salmond's worst period of all was probably when he was leading the SNP as the main opposition party in the newly formed Scottish Assembly in 1999-2000. This ought to have been a high watermark. Although the creation of an Assembly was not full independence, which was what the SNP wanted, they proclaimed it as a step on the way, and promised to help make the Assembly work.

But after only 11 months, Salmond announced that he was getting out. The overt reasons seemed to have nothing to do with Scottish politics. Salmond had campaigned vociferously against Tony Blair's decision to send troops into Kosovo. Some of his colleagues supported intervention, and complained that they had not been consulted.

Salmond had also fallen out with Ian Blackford, an investment banker he had taken on to run the party's finances. The SNP's debts were unmanageably large for a party of that size. Blackford accused Salmond and his allies of profligacy. Margo McDonald, heroine of one the SNP's biggest by-election victories, was angry that Salmond would not allow the party debate the cannabis laws.

Another big-name by-election winner was Jim Sillars, who had seized the rock-solid Labour seat of Glasgow Govan in 1988 in a masterly campaign organised by Salmond. But it had not taken them long to fall out very publicly. When Salmond quit, Jim Sillars told the Scottish Sun: "I will not join in the hypocritical praise that will be heaped upon Alex Salmond now that he has snuffed out his political life at the top. He was never big enough for the times. He was only a spin machine, spinning in a policy vacuum."

Ominously, therefore, the last time Salmond was at the head of a substantial contingent of MSPs, he could not cope. He could not sort out the differences between the social radicals, such as Margo McDonald, and more conservative nationalists. He preferred to stick with the Westminster Parliament, which he says should not be ruling Scotland.

Like London's Ken Livingstone, Salmond is a performer who needs a big stage. He is supremely confident when taking on Tony Blair in the House of Commons. The daily grind in a relative backwater like the Scottish Assembly did not suit him at all. Being first minister in a devolved Scottish Parliament will not be enough for him either. He wants a seat in the Council of Europe, as head of government of the latest small, independent state to join the EU. He wants to control the tax revenues from Scottish oil. If this comes about at all, it will take several years, and in the meantime Scots will be looking to the impatient Mr Salmond to produce immediate improvements in their lives.

Victory next week will take Alex Salmond a giant step closer to achieving his life's ambition. For the first time since the Act of Union, 300 years ago, Scotland will be run by someone who wants independence from England, and that will guarantee Salmond some sort of place in the history books. He will just have to hope that his second term in the Scottish Assembly is less disastrous than the first.

A Life in Brief

BORN 31 December 1954, Linlithgow.

EDUCATION Linlithgow Primary School, Linlithgow Academy, University of St Andrews.

FAMILY Married Moira French McLashan in 1981. No children.

CAREER Scottish civil servant, 1978-80; economist, Royal Bank of Scotland, 1980-87; MP for Banff and Buchan since 1987; MSP, 1999-2001; SNP National Convenor, 1990-2000 and since 2004.

HE SAYS "As First Minister I will trust the people of Scotland to decide on our nation's future. No ifs, no buts."

THEY SAY "Increasingly people are realising that Alex Salmond would not be a fit person to be first minister of Scotland." Jack McConnell, (Labour) First Minister of Scotland

Interesting? Click here to explore further