Alex Salmond and the memorable phone call I declined to answer

It came on a rainy day in May, about a week before the 2021 election for the Scottish Parliament.

It was notable only because he was calling me while I was standing speaking to the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, inside the SNP’s yellow election campaign battle bus, in a car park in Prestonpans.

For a journalist who had spent the preceding months watching the dramatic disintegration of what remained of their relationship during Holyrood’s inquiry into the handling of harassment allegations against Mr Salmond, it was an interesting moment.

Afterwards, I joked to colleagues that perhaps I should have answered, put the phone on loudspeaker, and attempted to broker a reconciliation.

Maybe a better journalist would have done so, but I was not that bold.

We eventually did speak that day but, if I’m honest, I rarely relished my encounters with him in the 15 years I spent covering Scottish politics.

He was never particularly difficult with me during the dozen or so, relatively inconsequential times we interacted.

However, as a young journalist I always had a sense he could tear me to pieces at any moment if he wished, and it stayed with me.

I remember standing in a line of journalists waiting to interview him for the first time, not long after Mr Salmond came to power in 2007.

As we watched, a reporter from the BBC asked a question the first minister did not appreciate.

Mr Salmond started questioning the journalist, before grabbing the notes from out of his hand to read them for himself, incredulously mocking the premise of the inquiry.

When it was my turn, he told me with some certainty that I would remember that day for the rest of my life, because of what he was announcing.

He was wrong, I have no recollection of the announcement. But I did always remember my first experience of him.

It was not long before Mr Salmond was back in Aberdeen, and this time it was me who had asked a question he did not like, although he did not show it initially at the press conference.

Afterwards, however, I introduced him to a work experience student who was with me. He turned to her and said: “Work experience… with this guy?”

Ouch. Several years later I recounted the story to a colleague who responded: “Yeah, he did that to me too.”

This kind of approach only added to his aura. It was certainly different from the way most other political leaders engaged.

In the run-up to the 2011 Holyrood election, I again had the chance to interview Mr Salmond, but this time I would be getting over an hour with him, at the five-star Marcliffe Hotel in Aberdeen, a favourite haunt of his.

Once the interview was over, he spoke to me at length about the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, one of the biggest controversies of the preceding years.

Unfortunately, I was out of my depth. As a council reporter at the time, I was more up to speed with the potholes in Garthdee than Colonel Gaddafi’s security services in Libya in the 1980s.

As a result, I have never known if Mr Salmond was handing me a great scoop, or if he was just shooting the breeze as he scoffed oatcakes at the Marcliffe.

During the actual interview I briefly caught him off-guard by asking if he was confident of victory. Not of the SNP retaining power, but of winning his Aberdeenshire East seat. He chortled and said I had been the first person to ask him that during the campaign.

In the end Mr Salmond did both, securing almost two-thirds of the vote in the constituency, and winning a landslide at Holyrood that made a historic independence referendum irresistible.

The next time I saw Mr Salmond would have been outside 10 Downing Street, where he would take questions after meetings with David Cameron, the then prime minister.

By then I had relocated to Westminster, where much of the early jostling over the referendum was happening.

When it came to the vote itself, I had been disappointed initially to have been told to have the night off, with Scotland-based colleagues to handle the historic moment, while I was to come on duty the next morning.

As it turned out, the next day was hugely dramatic as Mr Salmond turbocharged support for the SNP by announcing his resignation.

I followed the proceedings from my bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush, producing a lengthy profile of one of Scotland’s most significant politicians, assuming he was bowing out.

The sub editors cut the piece in half, and it was lucky they did, as the next time I saw him was just a few months later when he exuberantly swept back to the Commons after winning the Gordon seat at the 2015 election.

I bumped into him on an escalator at Portcullis House on his return, and he was on good form.

The mood had changed altogether by the next time we were in the same room, however, at the Champany Inn near Linlithgow in 2018.

Other patrons were left bemused as a throng of journalists arrived at the restaurant for a press conference with the former first minister, which he had called to deny allegations of sexual harassment.

The very last time I saw Mr Salmond was the following year, inside Edinburgh’s High Court, for a preliminary hearing ahead of his trial, at which he would later be cleared of the charges.

With his passing on Saturday, suddenly there are so many questions I wish I had asked him when the chance was there, during our previous encounters.

But I still do not think I would have answered that phone call.