If the history books even bother telling the story of how the Alba Party died, their verdict will probably be a paradoxical one: that the party failed because it was fundamentally un-Salmondite in nature. By "Salmondite" I'm not referring to policy or ideology (although Alba certainly strayed much too far from the common sense centre-left policy profile of the Salmond-era SNP), but to a philosophy of party management. Nothing better encapsulated how Mr Salmond ran the SNP than the incident in 1995 when a vetting committee of party elders blocked Roseanna Cunningham from standing as the SNP candidate in the Perth & Kinross by-election - a completely indefensible decision given that it was based on an ancient episode in Ms Cunningham's personal life, and given that she had been permitted to stand in the same constituency in the 1992 general election. Mr Salmond turned on the charm in all directions, ensuring the decision was overturned, while somehow keeping on board (and on message) those who had made the decision and had been hellbent on thwarting Ms Cunningham. If charm and flattery could be used to keep people of sharply different views and temperaments inside the tent, that always seemed to be Mr Salmond's first recourse, and it usually worked.
In a very small way, I experienced a bit of that myself in the early days of Alba, just after I was elected to the party's NEC. I had been astonished to see "Barrhead Boy" mounting a soft coup of sorts by repeatedly insisting that Alba had to basically fiddle the franchise for any future indyref by excluding many English-born residents of Scotland from the voters' roll - an idea that was totally irreconcilable with the values of the Salmond-era SNP, and that I had naively assumed would also be irreconcilable with the values of Alba. But Mr Salmond very noticeably failed to shut Barrhead Boy down, probably because he was fretting about alienating the aficionados of "Prism", most of whom were Alba people at the time (how times change). Instead his main priority was to stop Barrhead Boy and myself disagreeing about the subject in public. So of course we both received phone calls. I can only tell you for sure about the content of my own call, but it was 0.1% menace and 99.9% charm. He said he totally agreed with me about the whole thing, and that Barrhead Boy was bang out of order. He said that no party led by him would ever support anything other than a civic franchise for a future indyref, meaning that he would never support the exclusion of English people. But he added that he needed space to sort things out with Barrhead Boy quietly and away from the public gaze. At the end of the call, he asked me rather beseechingly whether I would be prepared to trust him to do that. It's very hard to say "no" in response to a question like that, and of course I did not say no.
My guess is that Barrhead Boy's call will have been just as charm-heavy but with very different content. Mr Salmond probably will have assured Barrhead Boy that he was going to "sort me out" but that he needed space to do it away from the public gaze. "Will you trust me to do that, Roddy?" he would have beseechingly asked, and Barrhead Boy would have replied of course, Alex, yes of course I trust you. And just like me, Barrhead Boy immediately and magically became much more muted in his public comments.
Charm works. It really does. So where the hell did it disappear to? When Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh delivered her outrageous, jealousy-fuelled "either they go or I go" demand to Mr Salmond in the summer of 2023 about Alba's popular Organisation Convener, Denise Findlay, and the Membership Support Convener Jacqueline Bijster, why didn't he do what he'd done in 1995? In other words, why didn't he ensure that Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster stayed in harness while using his charm to mollify Tyrannical Tas? Why did he instead do the complete opposite and essentially sign Alba's death warrant by instructing Chris McEleny, who was administering the party's internal elections, to allow that role to be unconstitutionally usurped so that the election process could be rigged and the Alba membership's decision to re-elect Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster could be thwarted by any means necessary?
Again, in a smaller way, I had direct experience of this total sea-change in Mr Salmond's approach to party management. When I stood up to both in-person and online bullying from Shannon Donoghue and Chris Cullen in early-to-mid 2024, and they submitted a malicious complaint about me in response, Mr Salmond did absolutely nothing to try to defuse the situation. The Salmond of old would at least have attempted to knock heads together, but instead he poured fuel on the fire by breaking off all communication with me and putting his full weight behind a process that he knew would lead to my expulsion - and he did that for exactly the same reason, ie. simply because Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who is very close to the Donoghue/Cullen faction (the so-called Corri Nostra), demanded it of him. Frankly, I regard his decision as a personal betrayal, given that he had gone to considerable lengths to cultivate my support in the months leading up to Alba's creation, and particularly given that I had suffered a significant personal cost as a result of sticking my head above the parapet and backing him in the spring of 2021. No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes.
The bottom line is that Ahmed-Sheikh had some kind of massive hold over him by 2023/24, and he literally seemed to find it impossible to say no to her, even when he knew that what she was asking of him (ie. the vote-rigging to eject Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster) was terribly, terribly wrong. I've heard a rumour, which has the ring of truth to it, that not long before his death he visited the home of one of the party's main financial backers, looked sadly into his eyes, and said that what had gone wrong with Alba was that "the women fell out". I'd suggest that's as close as he ever got to admitting to himself or to others that Ahmed-Sheikh was the problem, and that the party had been destroyed by her raging jealousy, her personal vendettas, and her wider egotism.
I've also been told by multiple different sources, indeed there's a near-total consensus on this, that what Alba is really about to Ahmed-Sheikh is personal status. Being chair of a party with parliamentary representation for four and a half years has allowed her to tour Europe and attend conferences with an impressive-sounding title against her name. Now that Ash Regan has consigned Alba to fringe status by stripping them of parliamentary representation, things may get trickier for Tas, but she's presumably hoping that the party's connections with the late, great Alex Salmond will keep the invitations coming and allow her to keep rubbing shoulders with wealthy, glamorous, influential people.
Ahmed-Sheikh may be utterly insufferable, but she's no fool, and she can read opinion polls and local by-election results just like the rest of us can. She knows there isn't a cat in hell's chance that Alba will win even one list seat next May, but she's full-bloodedly selling that false hope to all and sundry to preserve her precious personal status. Anyone seriously considering voting for Alba needs to ponder on that as a matter of some urgency. It's one thing if you're casting a positive vote because you think Alba's policy programme is the best, but if you're instead casting an essentially hollow "tactical" vote because you've been cynically hoodwinked into thinking that will somehow increase the number of pro-indy MSPs, then you are being made a schmuck of. You aren't "Maxing the Yes", you're just maxing Ahmed-Sheikh's access to champagne and sycophancy.
If you're in any doubt as to how Ahmed-Sheikh has poisoned Alba's internal culture, consider what happened at the recent Dundee conference when she publicly treated the former MEP Hugh Kerr like dirt and threatened to eject him from the hall. He quite naturally decided to preserve his dignity by instead walking out voluntarily, spending a nice day out at the V&A, then defecting to the new Corbyn/Sultana party and writing a lengthy, prominent article for The National that effectively functioned as Alba's obituary. That chain of events was easily foreseeable, and if the Salmond of old had been around, he would probably have literally intercepted Mr Kerr en route to the V&A to tell him how valued he was and to promise to have a quiet word in the ear of Tas. Instead, the Alba leadership just seemed to be really rather satisfied that yet another person of substance had left the sinking ship, and Kenny MacAskill (wryly referred to in some quarters as "Cruella's Hostage") later gratuitously directed petty, puerile insults at both Mr Kerr and Craig Murray. These are actions devoid of all class. What little remains of Alba in late 2025 is a pale shadow of the Salmond-era SNP, indeed it's a perverted caricature.
UPDATE (Saturday morning): The wording of this blogpost has now been very slightly amended, for reasons you can read about HERE.
Cruella LOL. She looks more like Cruella de Vil than Cruella de Vil herself does.
ReplyDeleteIsn’t the ‘hold’ she had over him completely explicable? Wasn’t she his partner for years?
ReplyDeleteWhy did Tasmina refuse to hand over his phone to Moira after his death?
DeleteTasmina ruined Alex’s life he died an angry, disappointed man. All Tasmina’s fault she was a control freak who isolated him from his supporters and it led him to be self destructive and eat and drink too much
ReplyDeleteHer greed and lifestyle had to be supported - she has a big mortgage and 4 kids getting put through private education he was her cash cow.
Alba really is a lesson in how not to build a party . Instead of Alba rising it was Alba sinking . Shame I don’t blame Alex it was Tasmina and others .
ReplyDeleteAlex was a grown man. He made his own choices, created and manufactured his own chaos and consequences. For the purposes of the court case - this is to be airbrushed out in order that Nicola Sturgeon, Lesley Evans etc are to be declared solely responsible for the sorry sad consequences of his own life, political, business and financial choices. From a distant observer view - it looks as if he owed Ahmed-Sheikh and others for something very significant to prop up and maintain his publicly perceived persona. Whilst it seems an habitual and often nostalgia sentimental approach to Alex - ie it's always others who are responsible for any negatives in his life - that kind of gives him a one-dimensional one of life's victims tag intended to summarise him as the master-strategist, titan - but snow-white at the same time. For the purposes of the court case - any perceived or actual negatives will have to be airbrushed out - and he will have to be presented as a 100% ethical, 100% truth-teller, 100% snow-white in both character and deed in all things past and up until his sad passing. That's perhaps proving to be a bit of a burden within Alba along with having to keep up the appearance of being a 100% legitimate political party claiming to be the driving force behind independence and allegedly the party who are pledging they are absolutely necessary to guarantee an independence majority for Holyrood 2026. Tough times.
ReplyDelete