LEGACIES are complex, contested things. The greater the influence a politician has wielded, the more likely they are to have made enemies along the way. The longer they have maintained that position of influence, the more likely they are to have errors of judgment mingled in with their achievements.

To bend opinion to your will requires charisma and ruthlessness, empathy and ego. And, if you have an ego, it takes a superhuman degree of restraint not to let power go to your head.

Alex Salmond was a brilliant politician who changed the political landscape forever. He could be excellent company and was capable of great acts of generosity. He could also be a bully and had a reputation for acting inappropriately around female members of staff.

Once upon a time, we could hold two competing truths in our heads. We could celebrate a leader’s strengths without diluting his weaknesses. But the world has become a more binary place. These days, we require them to be heroes or villains. Was Winston Churchill a great statesman or a war criminal? Don’t try to contextualise. Just pick your side, and be aware: your answer is not so much a statement of where you stand on Churchill, but where you stand in the all-consuming culture war.

Salmond has been particularly susceptible to polarised assessment because he represented something greater than his own achievements. Did he know, when he first uttered the words “the dream shall never die” that, for a certain demographic of older, steadfast Yes voters, he would become synonymous with it?

Thus his sudden passing in North Macedonia eight days ago inflicted a pain that went beyond the loss of one individual to the loss of the better future he embodied.

And who was better placed to bear the burden of that pain than the women those Yes voters already blamed for their idol’s diminished stature: the nine complainers at the centre of the sexual offences trial which saw him acquitted of all charges?

Women’s rights

Recasting himself and Alba as champions of women’s rights, Salmond had also become a figurehead for the gender-critical movement: a righteous warrior protecting the country from Nicola Sturgeon’s “progressive” approach to........

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