JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Salmond is too pivotal a figure in our history to airbrush out the creases in his character

On Monday morning a blast from Scotland's political past rang up a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in to offer some thoughts on the passing of Alex Salmond .

It was the former Highlands and Islands MSP Mary Scanlon, who was health spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives in the days that I used to speak to her regularly.

Her contribution both enchanted and saddened me. It offered a nostalgic reminiscence on the Holyrood she once knew, then drew the depressing contrast with the trenchant, tribal place it is today.

Ms Scanlon remembered lively back-room debates between Mr Salmond and the late David McLetchie, who led her party and later served as its chief whip.

When it seemed the SNP leader had his opponent out-foxed, devoted Hearts supporter McLetchie would fall back on football banter.

'Ach, you're just a plastic Jambo,' he would tell Mr Salmond. 'You don't even have a season ticket.'

At this, I was delighted to hear, Scottish nationalism's totemic figure would throw back his head roar with laughter. Two men on opposite sides of a political divide making a connection.

Ms Scanlon made many of these across party lines too.

She was a member of what became known as Holyrood's White Heather Club, a trio of women in elected politics who gathered for drinks and gossip in the Scottish Parliament bar.

The other two were the much-missed nationalist firebrand Margo McDonald and Christine Grahame, who remains an SNP MSP.

'I'm still friends with Christine and we've been to the funerals of several colleagues from those early days,' said Ms Scanlon earlier this year. 'But I wonder how many good relationships there are between members from the rival parties in the current climate of tribalism.'

She didn't, but the former MSP could have gone on to remind listeners that Alex Salmond largely sowed the division of which she speaks - that everything changed in the wake of the 2011 Scottish Parliament election in which the SNP contrived to break the system by winning an outright majority of seats.

She could have argued, as I would, that this was the beginning of the end of consensual politics in Scotland and that, thereafter, almost everything in the parliament was filtered through the competing prisms of nationalism and unionism.

No doubt, Ms Scanlon could have shared some deeply unflattering stories about Mr Salmond - tales dating much further back than 2011, the year his party's electoral supremacy went straight to his head.

Every Scottish politician (and many of us in the media) has a bank of these ageing anecdotes, each illustrating facets of the Salmond character which temper their admiration for the consummate politician.

He was capable of great charm and unspeakable rudeness - sometimes to the same person on the same day.

He was both a teddy bear and a tyrant, a boss who reduced staff to tears, bullied them, humiliated them and, as he himself acknowledged, too often invaded their personal space.

His vanity, his insatiable hunger for a platform, was such that he was broadcasting on the Kremlin-bankrolled Russia Today channel even as Putin's tanks rolled in to invade Ukraine.

The supposed arch political tactician made gaffe after gaffe in the post-referendum years - a reputation shredded by his own hand on the altar of his narcissism.

I was at the High Court in Edinburgh on the day in 2020 Mr Salmond's defence counsel Gordon Jackson QC told the jury he wished the former First Minister had been 'a better man'.

Had he been so, he said, Mr Salmond would not be sitting in the dock.

At least part of the strategy for achieving not guilty verdicts on a string of sex assault charges, then, was to admit the accused was not a very nice person albeit innocent of the crimes alleged.

Unlike Ms Scanlon, I cannot remember the good times without frank and honest reflections on the bad ones.

Mr Salmond is too pivotal a figure in Scotland's modern history to airbrush out the creases in his character.

He was a man, remember, who demanded - and got - absolute loyalty from his MSPs and MPs during his time as First Minister, yet who showed little semblance of it when power passed to his successor Nicola Sturgeon.

His self-regard was almost Trump-esque and, for her travails in having to cope with her predecessor's arrant antics - if not much else - Ms Sturgeon has my sympathies.

And yet, as ever with this most ambiguous of politicians, there were other sides to the man.

Indeed, what has become clear in the slew of obituaries over the last few days is Alex Salmond was almost any kind of character the authors wanted him to be.

For every portrait of the political bruiser who played the man rather than the ball, find another on the opposite wall of the clubbable type who put people at their ease.

Was he really supremely in command of policy detail, as some suggest, or a 'big picture' kind of guy, as I have also read?

It seemed he answered to all of the above and was not wholly any of them.

If the idea on his passing is to choose the Alex Salmond we wanted him to be then, for me, it is the one laughing his head off with David McLetchie back in the days when this kind of behaviour at Holyrood was nothing unusual.

It's the Alex Salmond who, for decades, was a friend with Tory right winger David Davis because they enjoyed each other's company even if they were worlds apart politically.

I'd like Alex Salmond to have been the guy who sat down for a boozy lunch a few weeks ago with fellow Scot Andrew Neil - another who shared few of his political opinions - and relished the gossip and catch-up as much as the fine food.

I want to remember him at his best, which, to my mind, was between the years 2007 and 2011 when the SNP was a minority government and, by necessity, had to reach out to other parties to get anything done in parliament.

Mr Salmond ran a tight ship then - and surely the most competent government we have seen in 25 years of devolution.

These were days when cross party friendships flourished, when the White Heather Club was in its pomp and politics benefited from a collaborative effort.

Alas, it worked so well for Mr Salmond that his party won too many seats at the next election.

And, alas, that Alex Salmond is nowhere near the whole story of who he was.

But where he proved a better leader - even arguably a better person - than Ms Sturgeon was in his ability to reach across the divide in politics, and sometimes set politics aside for the sake of good company.

He reasoned, quite correctly, that you learn more by engaging with those you disagree with than you do by shunning them - and the latter seems to have been the modus operandi of the SNP ever since Mr Salmond left Holyrood.

Ms Sturgeon may have harboured considerable antipathy for him in his final years - much of it, perhaps justified.

But her mentor was a multi-dimensional, shape-shifting politician and I fear she focused on the wrong dimension and the wrong shape.

Mr Salmond divided Scotland for a time. But the nation's lamentable tribalism is largely a Sturgeon-era phenomenon.