Alba is not in a good place when the only thing that matters in the leadership election is who sounds most convincing when they say "Alex would have wanted me to win"

I very nearly posted the other night to say that the Alba leadership election was over before it really got started, because with the extraordinarily rare political intervention from Moira Salmond to endorse Kenny MacAskill, it had become almost inevitable that Mr MacAskill would win.  Whatever the previous logic for thinking Ash Regan might have a chance, the Twitter polls, her known support among feminists, etc, none of that mattered anymore, because in a party that has consciously redefined itself as the 'Alex Salmond Memorial Party', the members aren't going to go against a statement from Mr Salmond's widow that he would have wanted Mr MacAskill to win.

But now Ms Regan has fought back by claiming that Mr Salmond had told her privately that he wanted her to replace Mr MacAskill as his deputy, and that he would also have wanted her to succeed him because he was a pragmatist and recognised the importance of the party's sole parliamentarian having a senior role.  That's a smart tactic from her, not least because it's literally the one and only tactic that has any chance whatsoever of keeping her in contention.  But my goodness, what volumes that speaks about Alba's current state.  In this leadership election, ideas don't matter, competence doesn't matter, even personality and charisma doesn't matter.  The only thing that matters is how convincing you sound when you say "Alex would have wanted me as leader". 

No party can prosper electorally as a sort of memorial stone to one man.  It will swiftly become fossilised.

There are differing interpretations over how tightly linked Ash Regan and Chris McEleny are, and over whether McEleny is still Ms Regan's presumptive éminence grise.  Personally, I don't have much doubt that he is.  Everything Ms Regan has been saying recently has McEleny's fingerprints all over them, including the nastiness of her public claims that Mr MacAskill had told her that he was going to retire, and that Mr Salmond had told her that he didn't want Mr MacAskill to remain his deputy. The clincher will come if Ms Regan claims that she was telepathically linked with Mr Salmond.

Ms Regan's blueprint for Alba's future, as a pro-independence alternative to Reform, also looks to have been devised by McEleny, and is fully in tune with his anti-immigrant dogwhistle of a few weeks back.  I suspect the Regan-McEleny link-up is precisely why Moira Salmond has so firmly concluded that her husband would have wanted Alba members to reject Ms Regan, and indeed Mr MacAskill himself has warned increasingly forcefully of the folly of Alba turning to the right.

But this raises an obvious question in my mind.  If Mr Salmond recognised the dangers of McEleny's wilder policy ideas, why did he never take any action to rein McEleny in?  If anything, McEleny seems to have been given latitude to make up Alba policy on the hoof, and it was often hard to tell whether some of the weirder stuff was intended as Alba policy or not. For example, he once announced on Twitter that Gibraltar should be returned to Spain, which plays well to the gallery, but isn't really consistent with a belief in democratic self-determination - Gibraltar has a long-established, stable population which has consistently rejected Spanish rule.  He also once said the European Union should stop admitting eastern European countries and should expand into North Africa instead.  I mean, what?!