Do hopes of Scottish independence now rest on the Sturgeon-Salmond relationship?

The cold war between Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond, is now a hot one, as they prepare to face each other on the election battlefield.

Salmond insists that his new party, Alba, is intended to help the nationalist cause by getting more pro-independence candidates elected to the Scottish parliament than the SNP can on its own. But Sturgeon seems unconvinced that her former mentor is trying to be helpful.

“At the end of the day, we’ve got to win independence fair and square. We can’t game, or cheat, our way to that,” she said in a Daily Record interview yesterday. So why did she think he was putting himself forward to be elected back into the Scottish parliament? “I think he is standing because he loves the limelight and can’t bear not to be on the stage.”

This does not sound like someone who is likely to – as Salmond predicted in one of his interviews at the weekend – recover from the initial shock of his launch of a new party and come to accept that it is a brilliant tactic to obtain the one goal that matters above all to both of them: namely, independence.

He had told Times Radio that he was not going to “rise to the bait” of engaging with Sturgeon’s first sceptical comments after his announcement of the new party, before rising to the bait by patronising his former apprentice and suggesting that she couldn’t think straight, so overawed was she by his “historic” move.

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Plainly, the Sturgeon-Salmond feud is going to dominate the entire six-week election campaign, turning the TV debates between the five main established party leaders into a sideshow.

The “cold war” phase of their relationship, which was played out in the series of inquiries and hearings that followed Salmond’s acquittal on charges of sexual harassment and worse, already seems to have had a negative effect on support, not just for the SNP, but for independence. Which only goes to show that the boost for independence in the opinion polls last year was hardly the product of a fundamental shift of belief in the principle, as some enthusiastic nationalists proclaimed – some of them were already talking about a new “settled will” of the Scottish people, as supporters of devolution had done decades before.

It may be that Sturgeon and the SNP were riding high in the opinion polls last year mainly because she was seen to have handled the coronavirus crisis so well – despite few actual policy decisions that were different from those of Boris Johnson in London. But if the Salmond feud has dampened SNP confidence until now, the launch of Alba has the potential to damage Sturgeon and the SNP far more between now and 6 May.

Sturgeon was steely in her interview yesterday in refusing to negotiate with Salmond. She wants him to apologise for his admitted failings in behaviour towards women first. “He hasn’t done that, and therefore I’m not sure what the basis would be for me to sit down with him and have that discussion,” she said.

And she rejected not just his attempt to “cheat” the electoral system, but all his other ideas for securing a second independence referendum, such as taking to the streets or organising an unofficial referendum without the agreement of the UK government. She insisted that a second referendum had to be legal: “Any serious politician who tries to tell people there’s an alternative way of doing it that doesn’t tick all these boxes I think is misleading people.”

The feud is complicated by a series of presentational disasters that have afflicted Salmond’s new party, whose recruits so far seem to be mainly those rejected by the SNP for one reason or another, and mostly men. Jim Walker – an Alba candidate for central Scotland – called Sturgeon “a cow” on Twitter when she described Salmond, factually, as a gambler. And Alex Arthur – a former boxing champion standing in the Lothian region – has already got into trouble for an old tweet from last year, in which he described Romanian beggars in Edinburgh as “fat as big juicy over-fed pigs”.

This is going to get a lot nastier yet.