Farewell, then, Alba, the little party that tried to take on the Scottish political establishment and learned, as others had before it, that the establishment always wins. You can join it but you can never beat it.

When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul

When Salmond went, so did Alba’s soul

Just to rub salt into the wound, the party has imploded only two months before the Scottish Parliament elections. And that was Alba’s only real purpose: to contribute to a pro-independence majority at Holyrood which, so the notion went, would then notify Westminster that Scotland was leaving.

This was the plan set out by the late Alex Salmond in which he would have played the part of Moses, Keir Starmer Pharaoh, and the Scots the Israelites: ‘Let ma people go!’ It’s almost heartbreaking that we will never get to witness the absolute scenes this would have occasioned.

Alba was, depending on your prejudices, Salmond’s one-man band or an inevitable reaction to the SNP’s failure to achieve independence. Salmond quit the party to which he gave most of his life after a Scottish government investigation accused him of sexually harassing two women. The Scottish government admitted in court that its probe had been ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’, and ‘tainted with apparent bias’. The authorities then charged him with a series of sex crimes, but a jury cleared him on all counts. Salmond claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by some of the most powerful people in Scottish politics.........

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