JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Moira was his rock. Nicola his protégée. But both were to find their loyalty tested...

Shortly before 10am on March 19, 2020, an unexpected figure emerged from the car delivering Alex Salmond to the High Court in Edinburgh. It was his then 82-year-old wife.

This was the final day of evidence in an explosive trial which centred on the former First Minister’s treatment of women. He faced multiple charges based on accusations from multiple alleged victims. The most serious was attempted rape.

Moira Salmond was not present in court as the litany of claims - ultimately rejected by the jury - were laid out. She was absent when her husband took the stand and claimed that one of the sexual encounters detailed in the charges was consensual while another was a ‘sleepy cuddle’, for which he had apologised.

But here she was by his side as the trial neared its final act, backing him to the hilt as she had always done.

It was a day which pulled into sharp focus the disparate and contradictory strands of Alex Salmond’s relationships with the women in his life.

Alex Salmond with his wife Moira at Holyrood after he became First Minister in 2007

Who was he exactly? The doting, protective husband? The inappropriate, handsy male chauvinist boss? A charmer? A bruiser? A sexual predator?

The last of those, the jury found, he certainly was not. Yet the evidence for all the others seems overwhelming.

His sudden death on Saturday at the age of 69 brings to a close the career of perhaps the most significant Scottish politician of the last half century - a colossus of the Nationalist movement who deployed his political skills to devastating effect in pursuit of independence.

But, while he may not have believed it at the time, Mr Salmond’s career in frontline politics was already over by the time he and his wife made that short walk to the High Court door. He had become unelectable. Women were his downfall.

One of those women was his former protegee Nicola Sturgeon. As a rising star in the SNP, she hero-worshipped him, hung on his coat-tails. As First Minister, her feelings turned to barely-concealed loathing.

There were the women - none of whom can be identified - who gave evidence against him in 2020. Notwithstanding his acquittal, there was enough in what he acknowledged as true to damage his reputation irreparably.

Getting drunk on a Chinese spirit in an upstairs bedroom of Bute House with ‘Ms F’, a young civil servant, and cuddling her on the bed; a crude sexual encounter in the same building with ‘Ms H’.

There was a claim - which Mr Salmond denied - that new staffing rotas were introduced in the First Minister’s official residence to ensure he was never left alone with a female worker at night.

There were women journalists who described excruciating meetings with him. During one in the Palace of Westminster, he kissed his startled interviewer on the lips and kicked his shoes off under the table as he answered questions over brandies and soda.

And, of course, there were women voters. Mr Salmond’s alpha-male brand of leadership made some uncomfortable. It was his deputy Ms Sturgeon who sweetened the SNP electoral pill. When she started condemning him too, it was game over.

In one of her most damaging critiques of her former boss, she said of him: ‘As First Minister I refused to follow the age-old pattern of allowing a powerful man to use his status and connection to get what he wants.’

Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon closing the SNP conference in Glasgow in 2012

If women proved Mr Salmond’s political undoing, decades earlier they had helped forge the firebrand he became.

The West-Lothian-born school leaver was as Labour-leaning as his father Robert when he first attended St Andrews University, but an ideological clash with Debbie Horton, his English girlfriend there, ended with her screaming: ‘If you feel like that, go and join the bloody Scots Nationalists.’

He took her suggestion to heart and, the following day, presented himself at the Dundee offices of the SNP.

It was a few years later, while working as an assistant economist at the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland that he first met Moira French McGlashan.

He was only 24. She was his boss and already past 40. Within three years they were married.

It was this astute and empathic figure who helped mould her husband into an electable MP. She was his sounding board, his older, wiser counsel, the woman who managed his wardrobe, the ever- present hostess at her husband’s strategy meetings. She even taught him how to drive.

‘Moira is Alex’s support system,’ said one SNP source shortly before Mr Salmond became First Minister in 2007. ‘She is absolutely essential to the phenomenon that is Alex Salmond. She is everything that any politician would want in a partner. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a love match.’

For his part Mr Salmond was ever unfailingly generous in his tributes to her. ‘Moira is my life,’ he said in a BBC Radio 4 interview in 2011. ‘I have been married for 30 years and she has done it with such grace and patience and been so helpful. I have just been so lucky.’

Yet he was clear that, while he may be ‘public property’, she was certainly not. They gave a joint interview just once - in 1990 - and both appeared to regret it.

‘He hasn’t a clue about the colours of ties, shirts and socks,’ Mrs Salmond told the Sunday newspaper. ‘He just puts on the nearest thing to hand.’

She added: ‘Sometimes I switch on the six o’clock news and I’m horrified by what he is wearing.’

And, when-oh-when, she went on, was he ever going to put up that new pole for her curtains?

Some years later Mr Salmond joked that, while accompanying him on an unofficial visit to Bute House, his wife had brought the measuring tape and was eager to move in.

The truth is their house in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, was more her style than the splendour of the mini-palace in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square.

She was rarely in the official residence after he became First Minister - and maintained a profile so low she could have walked down any Scottish high street without being recognised.

At the close of her husband’s annual conference speech, it was never she who was ushered onstage for the obligatory hug. The duty to negotiate the Salmond embrace typically fell on his then deputy Ms Sturgeon.

The optics were appropriate, perhaps, because their relationship was a marriage of sorts too.

‘No one knows him better than I do, with the possible exception of Moira,’ Ms Sturgeon once boasted when they were still thick as thieves.

The truth, it turned out, was theirs was a political marriage of convenience - and they did not know each other as well as either thought.

It was dinner for two at the Champany Inn near Linlithgow which sealed the partnership back in 2004. Mr Salmond, who had resigned the party leadership four years earlier, had sworn he had no intention of entering the contest to replace his successor John Swinney.

But his certainty that Ms Sturgeon would lose in her leadership battle with Roseanna Cunningham - whose ambitions he was eager to thwart - convinced him to renege on his promise and propose that he and Ms Sturgeon should run on a joint ticket.

The move deepened the rift between Mr Salmond and Ms Cunningham and all but destroyed the friendship of the two SNP women.

A further layer of intrigue was added when Mr Salmond admitted he would never have entered the contest had his wife Moira not given the plan her blessing.

A complex dynamic of pacts and enmities with key women in his life set Mr Salmond on a course for the office of First Minister - and ultimately, for winning the prize of a referendum on independence.

It was following his defeat in that referendum and his resignation as First Minister that the most politically significant relationship in his life began to break down.

While Ms Sturgeon was elected unopposed as SNP leader, her erstwhile mentor set his sights on Westminster, and made a boisterous return there in the May 2015 election.

During a Commons debate, he told the Business Minister Anna Soubry, ‘Behave yourself, woman,’ an attitude she said belonged ‘firmly in the 19th century’.

Now Ms Sturgeon was being asked whether Alex Salmond was sexist.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said at the time. ‘There’s no man I know who is less sexist.’

Her patience was tested further when Mr Salmond lost his Gordon seat in 2017 - his first constituency defeat in 30 years.

He put on a talk show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe where he told a toe-curling blue joke referencing both Prime Minister Theresa May and Ms Sturgeon herself.

She was said to be ‘fizzing’ about the gag which she said smacked of the ‘Benny Hill era’ - but again defended him on accusations of sexism.

Weeks later, he infuriated her by launching the Alex Salmond Show on the controversial RT channel, bankrolled by the Kremlin.

Mr Salmond’s own party had voiced alarm at the channel, pointing to reports of attacks on dissenting journalists and persecution on the grounds of race and sexuality.

But it was the events of 2018 that ruptured their relationship irreparably. She agreed to meet with him in her home near Glasgow in April that year and there, in her kitchen, he handed her a Scottish Government letter informing him of harassment allegations against him.

Worse, the man she had looked up to for decades told her there was indeed an incident of inappropriate behaviour during his time in Bute House, for which he had apologised to the woman concerned. It seemed to Ms Sturgeon he wanted her to make the allegations go away.

It was then the scales fell from her eyes, then that she saw him for the first time as that ‘powerful man’ using ‘status’ to get what he wanted. Within weeks, they were on a collision course.

Mr Salmond declared war on his successor’s government, launching a legal battle over its handling of the allegations against him and resigning from the party.

He won it, but was soon pitched into fresh torment. A criminal case was being built against him - prompted, he was convinced, by enemies in the party he had led to power.

There were claims Ms Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell, the party’s then chief executive and a former constituency assistant of Mr Salmond, was part of an SNP plot to end his former boss’s career and even put him in prison.

Mr Salmond clearly gave them credence, which raised questions about his wife’s involvement. Suddenly, the party was engaged in the bloodiest of civil wars, its two totemic figures on opposing sides in it.

Throughout the trial that followed ran the thread of an unreconstructed male invading the personal space of women who were not his wife. Equally damaging, perhaps, was Ms Sturgeon’s most public rejection of a man she admitted that, next to her husband and parents, she had loved.

She owed her career to him but planned never to speak to him again.

Who, then, was the man behind the politician? A loving husband, certainly, but as he once put it, ‘no angel’.

That he came to life in the company of women no one, not even he, could deny. Drink emboldened him - at times to the point of inappropriateness.

While rumours about his personal life circulated for decades, no allegations of any affair were ever printed.

No doubt he preferred to see himself as a mentor of women in politics. That, clearly, is how several saw him.

Ash Regan, the former SNP minister, defected from the party to join Mr Salmond in his new outfit Alba. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, a former SNP MP, did likewise.

The latter and Mr Salmond were in each other’s company so often that Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser once mischievously tweeted: ‘It’s almost like they’re inseparable.’

She was with the former Minister again at the conference in North Macedonia where he died at the weekend.

But it was the success of his relationship with his first female apprentice that shaped the political landscape - and the breakdown of it that re-shaped it.

Mr Salmond told a BBC documentary a few weeks ago that it was ‘a big regret that Nicola and I are no longer on speaking terms - and I seriously doubt if it’s going to improve.’

Ms Sturgeon told the same programme he was integral to some of the best moments of her life. ‘It’s hard now to look back on them with just unalloyed pleasure and joy.’

The two never did speak again.

As nationalists mourn a flawed but brilliant politician, many will conclude he was the most potent force in the movement’s history.

But his history with women - and their interpretation of it - will be inescapable in their reflections on his passing.