When he was acquitted on sexual assault charges at the High Court in Edinburgh last March, I predicted: ‘Alex Salmond is back from the dead and he will have his revenge’. The past 12 months has seen a relentless onslaught against Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP establishment and anyone who thought that would culminate in the equivocal findings of two inquiries (one clearing Sturgeon, the other damning her) will have been disabused this afternoon.
Salmond has announced his return to politics in time for May’s Holyrood elections, under the banner of an outfit calling itself the Alba Party. The party will stand only on the regional list and is pitching itself as an effort to help secure an ‘independence supermajority’. Salmond himself will stand in the North East of Scotland. The SNP didn’t win any list seats there last time. (The list balances out first past the post seats and the Nationalists won nine of the 10 constituencies.)
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