Alex Salmond is losing his voice but that’s not going to stop him from talking — I doubt that anything would, or could. I meet him in the Savoy, after The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards (he won top gong) and he orders a hot toddy — setting out the ingredients just in case the Savoy Hotel is too English to know how to make one.
No one talking to Scotland’s former first minister today would have any idea that his political dream was clearly rejected by Scottish voters just three months ago. He is relishing the SNP surge and the likelihood of his party holding the balance of power at Westminster next year, which he gleefully describes as ‘the favourite’s bet just now’. This prospect has persuaded him to stand for the House of Commons again.
Salmond is in fact more confident and relaxed than almost any politician I have ever interviewed. This is not demob happiness, either — one gets the clear impression that there are several more acts to come in this Scottish play; tellingly, the only opponents he praises are the former Labour MSP Wendy Alexander, who has retired, and Gordon Brown, who is about to.
Three things perhaps explain why Salmond is such a ray of sunshine. First, he’s determined not to give his enemies the satisfaction of seeing him suffer. He describes the famous picture of him sitting glum-faced in the back of a car on referendum night as ‘that ridiculous photo that keeps getting used’. He protests, rather too much, that ‘I was looking at my laptop, the reflection is the laptop, that’s what it is. I was not in the depths of despair, I was trying to read the results on my laptop at Aberdeen airport.’
Second, and more important, is that Salmond believes that while he may have lost the referendum battle, he will still win the war.
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