Almost all political careers, even the most glittering, end in failure. That of Alex Salmond, the former leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), who died suddenly on 12 October, was no exception. Like one of his heroes, the Irish Nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, he died discredited because of an unsavoury court case. Out of office, out of Parliament in both Westminster and Holyrood, he damaged his reputation by hosting a talk-show on the TV channel, RT, formerly Russia Today. Although he insisted that he had editorial control, even many of his remaining admirers were dismayed to see him serving as a stooge for Vladimir Putin. Then, having left the SNP, for whose rise he was more responsible than anyone else, the new fringe party Alba he founded amounted to very little.

Yet it would be wrong to dwell only on the last years of his career, which dismayed so many of his supporters and former colleagues. He was the most remarkable and, for a long time, successful politician not only of his own times, but for many generations. Before Salmond the SNP was insignificant, the home of romantics and cranks. The idea that it could be a governing party was risible. Conversations about Scottish Independence would end with a sigh, ‘aye, it would be grand, but we could never afford it’. Salmond made the impossible seem possible, even, for a few years, probable.

The young Salmond was a practical man, no misty-eyed dreamer. When the fresh-faced Salmond became leader of the SNP, many of his colleagues distrusted Labour’s conversion to the creation of a devolved parliament in Edinburgh; and not surprisingly. Donald Dewar, the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1997 Blair government, believed that devolution would contribute to better governance of Scotland and the United Kingdom. That was its purpose. Devolution would kill off the SNP. There were nationalists who feared he might be right. Salmond saw things differently. So in the Scottish referendum campaign of 1997 he campaigned alongside Dewar.

What some derided as ‘a wee pretendy parliament’, Salmond saw as a stepping stone to independence. At that time, writing a political column for the Scotsman, Scotland’s paper of record, I repeatedly wrote that ‘Dewar and Salmond can’t both be right’, one wanting reform to strengthen the United Kingdom, the other to break it. You might now say that Dewar was right. A quarter of a century after the creation of the Scottish parliament, the Union remains unbroken. Nevertheless, in 2014, the year of an independence referendum, Salmond came close – uncomfortably close for Unionists – to achieving his astonishing ambition.

Even so, he found the early years of devolution trying. Still, as was then possible, a member of both parliaments, he found Holyrood boring, Westminster much more enjoyable. He even resigned the leadership. Still, it wasn’t long before he was tempted back or, perhaps more accurately, saw an opportunity to invigorate the party. He stood for the leadership again, having formed an alliance with a very young Glasgow MSP, Nicola Sturgeon, who was seeking election as leader herself. He persuaded her to stand aside and be his deputy. It was a characteristically shrewd move. To win power, the SNP needed to win Glasgow and the traditionally Labour urban west of Scotland. Salmond himself had no roots in the industrial, or post-industrial, west. He himself represented an Aberdeenshire rural constituency. With his easy manner, and willingness to engage anyone in conversation, he was popular there. ‘He’s no’ a bad lad’, an Aberdeenshire farmer, a lifelong Tory with Liberal connections, told me.

The alliance with Sturgeon, with her Glasgow power base, coupled with the fact that Salmond in those days could chat and argue with anyone, made him a politician with a country-wide appeal. I recall covering a campaign and being in a pub where a burly chap who had had a few drinks greeted him with angry hostility. Ten minutes later they might have been old buddies. That was Salmond in early middle-age, a man with the common touch who could also ‘talk wit kings’ – having a sideline as a racing tipster for the Glasgow Herald, he also, one is told, had happy conversations with the Queen about the turf.

In the 2007 Holyrood election the SNP won one seat more than Labour, a remarkable achievement. He promptly declared he would head a minority government. The Tories, eager to hit Labour hard, agreed. Salmond and the Tory Leader Annabel Goldie worked amicably together. He made a few not very important concessions to secure and retain their support and treated the amiable Goldie as his auntie. Four years later Salmond had a majority at Holyrood and called for an independence referendum. In drawing up the terms, he ran rings round the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, perhaps because Cameron was as blithely confident as he would later be in the Brexit referendum. There was reason in his confidence: the Nationalists then stood at 33 per cent in the polls.

The campaign saw a surge in support for independence. The ‘Yes’ campaign had the wind in its sails. There was a surge of enthusiasm for a ‘Yes’ vote like nothing seen in modern Scottish political history. Salmond seemed for the first time a national, not only a nationalist leader. Even an inept performance in a television debate when, uncharacteristically under-prepared, he was rattled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, did little to halt the momentum. In the last days, the Unionists showed signs of panic. The popular surge in massive pro-independence meetings seemed to make what had been deemed improbable all too likely. By polling time Salmond was convinced he would win. The disappointment was shattering. He resigned as First Minister, passing the baton to Sturgeon. I confess I have never understood why, but then I have never understood why British party leaders, whether in government or opposition, now resign as soon as they have lost an election, or indeed a referendum.

The nationalist surge was maintained after the referendum defeat. In the general election of 2015 they won all but two of the Scottish seats, Salmond himself, having left Holyrood, now being returned to Westminster for the Gordon constituency in Aberdeenshire. He seemed to get a new lease of life back in the Commons but, two years later, in the election called by Theresa May, he lost his seat. He went out gallantly quoting Walter Scott’s lines from his poem about the Jacobite Leader Claverhouse, ‘Bonnie Dundee’: ‘you’ve no’ seen the last of my bonnets and me’, forgetting that Claverhouse was killed a few weeks later in the Battle of Killiecrankie. In effect this was the end of Salmond’s career as a serious politician.

Then came the allegations of sex offences from 2018. The charges against him were serious, but he was acquitted on all counts, the most serious, an attempted rape, being judged ‘not proven’. This old peculiarity of Scots Law has been taken as meaning ‘we think you may be guilty, but it hasn’t been proved’ or, simply, ‘go away and don’t do it again’. It was a sad and painful end to his career. The creation of a new independence party, Alba, in 2021, was feeble and futile and it remains an irrelevant force in Scottish politics.

These last years shouldn’t be allowed to define a remarkable career. I have already said that he made what had been deemed improbable all but possible. No other member of the SNP could have done that. Whatever his many faults he was a giant figure in Scottish and indeed British politics.