Alex Salmond has become Russia’s useful idiot

When Alex Salmond became first minister of Scotland in 2007 many people wished him well. You did not need to have voted for the SNP to appreciate that Salmond’s minority administration was a welcome breath of fresh air. It replaced a tired and muddled Labour-Lib Dem coalition with one that had a pleasing sense of purpose and ambition. Scotland was ready to grow and Salmond seemed the kind of statesman who would not embarrass the nation. 

A decade later, Salmond is reduced to working for the Kremlin’s propaganda station “Russia Today”. It has been a depressing fall from grace, one to be pitied as much as anything else. You do not often see an erstwhile statesman chump himself quite so thoroughly as this. 

Salmond will henceforth present a weekly “chat show” on Russia Today, produced by a new company he has formed in association with his former Westminster colleague Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh. Meanwhile, despite taking money from a regime presiding over a country in which journalists who ask inconvenient questions have an uncanny habit of ending up dead, Salmond also hopes to become the next chairman of Johnston Press, publishers of The Scotsman, The Yorkshire Post and a couple of hundred local newspapers across Britain.