Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond is a Scottish politician and economist who served as First Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014.
89 Facts About Alex Salmond
2.
Alex Salmond served as the party's depute leader from 1987 to 1990.
3.
Alex Salmond was elected to the British House of Commons in 1987, serving as the Member of Parliament for Banff and Buchan from 1987 to 2010.
4.
Alex Salmond led the party through the first election to the Scottish Parliament in 1999, where the SNP emerged as the second largest party, with Alex Salmond as the Leader of the Opposition.
5.
Alex Salmond was elected as the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Banff and Buchan in that year's election.
6.
Alex Salmond resigned as leader in 2000 and stood down as an MSP the following year, when he was appointed leader of the SNP's Westminster group.
7.
Alex Salmond was re-elected as leader of the SNP in the 2004 leadership contest, after running on a joint ticket with Nicola Sturgeon.
8.
Alex Salmond led the SNP at Holyrood until Salmond was elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2007 for the Gordon.
9.
The SNP placed first, ahead of the governing Labour Party in the 2007 election with Alex Salmond securing a confidence and supply support from the Scottish Greens, resulting in Alex Salmond's appointment as first minister.
10.
Alex Salmond led an SNP minority government in his first term.
11.
Alex Salmond's government passed landmark legislation, including the abolishment of university tuition fees, the scrapping of prescription charges and commitment to renewable energy.
12.
Alex Salmond was the first nationalist first minister and in his first term he failed to obtain support for a referendum on Scottish independence due to insufficient support.
13.
Alex Salmond used this mandate to hold a referendum, which led to the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement and the 2014 referendum.
14.
Alex Salmond was the SNP International Affairs and Europe spokesperson from 2015 to 2017.
15.
Alex Salmond left the House of Commons at the 2017 general election after losing his seat to the Scottish Conservative Party candidate Colin Clark.
16.
Alex Salmond later was announced as the leader of a new pro-independence party, the Alba Party.
17.
Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond was born in his parents' home at 101 Preston Road, Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, on 31 December 1954.
18.
Alex Salmond is the second of four children born to Robert Fyfe Findlay Salmond, and Mary Stewart Salmond, both of whom were civil servants.
19.
Robert Alex Salmond, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, had originally worked as an electrician, and his family had been resident in Linlithgow since the mid-18th century.
20.
Alex Salmond remains a member of the Church of Scotland.
21.
Alex Salmond's parents were loving and caring and although he did not grow up poor, "money was tight" and the importance of education was emphasised in the family.
22.
Alex Salmond was a skinny child, often referred to by his father as a "skink", as in Cullen Skink.
23.
Alex Salmond was educated at Linlithgow Primary School, before attending Linlithgow Academy from 1966 to 1972.
24.
Alex Salmond studied at Edinburgh College of Commerce from 1972 to 1973, gaining an HNC in Business Studies, and was then accepted by the University of St Andrews, where he studied Economics and Medieval History.
25.
Alex Salmond was elected as vice-president of the students' representative council in 1977 and was nominated to join St Andrews Community Council that year.
26.
Alex Salmond graduated with a 2:2 Joint Honours MA in Economics and Medieval History in May 1978.
27.
Alex Salmond became active in the SNP when he joined the Federation of Student Nationalists at the University of St Andrews in 1973.
28.
Alex Salmond's conversion is generally credited to his then girlfriend, Debbie Horton, an English student from London, who was secretary of the St Andrews University Labour club.
29.
Alex Salmond started his political life as a committed left-winger inside the SNP and was a leading member of the socialist republican organisation within it, the 79 Group.
30.
Alex Salmond was, along with other group leaders, suspended from membership of the SNP when the 79 Group was banned within the larger party.
31.
Later that year Alex Salmond became Senior Vice Convener of the SNP.
32.
Alex Salmond was at this time still viewed as being firmly on the left of the party and had become a key ally of Jim Sillars, who joined him in the House of Commons when he won a by-election for the seat of Glasgow Govan in 1988.
33.
Alex Salmond served as a member of the House of Commons Energy Select committee from 1987 to 1992.
34.
When Gordon Wilson stood down as SNP leader in 1990, Alex Salmond decided to contest the leadership.
35.
Alex Salmond went on to win the leadership election by 486 votes to Ewing's 146.
36.
Alex Salmond's first spell as leader was characterised by a moderation of his earlier left-wing views and by his firmly placing the SNP into a gradualist, but still pro-independence, strategy.
37.
Alex Salmond was one of the few politicians in the UK to oppose the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.
38.
Alex Salmond was opposed to the conflict because it was not authorised by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which was a controversial subject at the time.
39.
In 1998, Alex Salmond won the Spectator Award for Political Strategist of the Year.
40.
Alex Salmond was elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and was one of its highest-profile members as Leader of the Opposition.
41.
Alex Salmond stood down as SNP leader in 2000, facing internal criticism after a series of high-profile fall-outs with party members, and was replaced by his preferred successor John Swinney, who defeated Alex Neil for the post.
42.
Alex Salmond resigned from the Scottish Parliament on 14 May 2001 to lead the SNP group in the House of Commons.
43.
Alex Salmond has gone further than many anti-war politicians in claiming that Blair's statements on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were consciously intended to deceive the public.
44.
On 15 July 2004, Alex Salmond said that he would be a candidate in the forthcoming election for the leadership of the SNP.
45.
Alex Salmond led the Scottish National Party through the 2007 election to the 3rd Scottish Parliament.
46.
On 16 May 2007, with the support of the Greens, Alex Salmond was elected by the Parliament to succeed Jack McConnell as First Minister of Scotland.
47.
Alex Salmond was appointed to the British Privy Council four weeks later.
48.
Alex Salmond became the first nationalist politician to hold the office of First Minister.
49.
Alex Salmond reduced the size of the Cabinet from nine members to six, and said he would seek to govern on a "policy by policy" basis.
50.
The Guardian reported in November 2007 that Alex Salmond believed Scotland would be independent within "the next decade".
51.
Alex Salmond had been First Minister for just over a month when a vehicle rammed the front entrance of the main terminal building at Glasgow Airport on 30 June 2007, the first terrorist attack in Scotland since the Lockerbie bombing incident in December 1988.
52.
Alex Salmond issued a statement regarding the attacks in Edinburgh, calling for "the need for vigilance and unity against the forces of terror and rightly praised the work of the emergency services".
53.
Alex Salmond called a meeting of the Scottish Government security advisers in St Andrew's House in Edinburgh, followed by a request from the Prime Minister Gordon Brown for Alex Salmond, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill and the Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini to attend an emergency COBRA meeting.
54.
Alex Salmond said it would be "unacceptable" for the SNP to be excluded from the 2010 UK election televised debate and sought "guarantees of inclusion from the broadcasters, given their inescapable duty to ensure fairness and impartiality in election-related coverage in Scotland" in the build up to the 2010 UK general election.
55.
Alex Salmond said it was unacceptable to Scotland as well as to the SNP for the broadcasters to exclude the party that formed the Scottish Government and was leading in Westminster election polls.
56.
Alex Salmond emphasised that he was not trying to stop any debates from being broadcast.
57.
Alex Salmond declined to attend those held on the BBC and ITV, and Angus Robertson agreed to take his place in the other debates.
58.
At this election, Alex Salmond was re-elected for Aberdeenshire East, essentially a reconfigured version of Gordon.
59.
On 7 November 2012, Alex Salmond surpassed the 2,001-day term of his predecessor, Jack McConnell.
60.
An agreement was signed on 15 October 2012 by David Cameron and Alex Salmond which provided a legal framework for the referendum to be held, and on 21 March 2013 the SNP government announced that the referendum would be held on 18 September 2014.
61.
Alex Salmond refunded the taxpayer more than a year later, after a newspaper had submitted a freedom of information request.
62.
The sequence in which these events occurred was acknowledged by the Scottish Government after 7 months, during which they initially maintained that they had no record of when Alex Salmond had repaid the money.
63.
Alex Salmond responded to a freedom of information request for information on his spending six months after receiving it, and referred to it as "ridiculous frippery".
64.
In 2012, Alex Salmond indicated in a television interview that he had sought the advice of his law officers on whether an independent Scotland would be part of the European Union.
65.
Alex Salmond has faced scrutiny for his closeness to Rupert Murdoch.
66.
Alex Salmond was an early supporter of then-future US President Donald Trump's controversial plans for a Trump International golf course in Aberdeenshire.
67.
Trump has twice lost bids in the Scottish courts to halt the development, leading Alex Salmond to describe him as a "three times loser", to which Trump called Alex Salmond a "totally irrelevant has-been".
68.
In January 2016, Alex Salmond, prompted by broadcasting colleague Iain Dale, called Trump a "chicken" for refusing to appear on his LBC talk show, which had then been recently launched.
69.
An agreement was signed on 15 October 2012 by David Cameron and Alex Salmond which provided a legal framework for the referendum to be held, and on 21 March 2013 the SNP government announced that the referendum would be held on 18 September 2014.
70.
On 19 September 2014, following the results of the independence referendum which confirmed a majority of the Scottish people had voted against independence, Alex Salmond announced that he would be resigning as First Minister in November 2014.
71.
On 7 December 2014, Alex Salmond announced that he would stand as the SNP candidate for the Westminster constituency of Gordon in the 2015 May election.
72.
Alex Salmond indicated that he did not intend to replace Angus Robertson, MP for Moray, as the SNP leader in the House of Commons.
73.
On 13 May 2015, Alex Salmond was appointed as the SNP's foreign affairs spokesman in the House of Commons.
74.
On election night, Alex Salmond lost his seat as member for Gordon to Colin Clark of the Conservatives, receiving 19,254 votes to the Conservatives' 21,861.
75.
On 9 November 2017, the RT channel announced he would host a show called The Alex Salmond Show on the network.
76.
Alex Salmond was criticised by Scottish politicians from the other parties for a perceived lack of judgement.
77.
In February 2022, Alex Salmond announced that his show on RT had been suspended, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
78.
Alex Salmond asked permanent secretary to the Scottish Government, Leslie Evans, to consider her position.
79.
On 23 March 2020, Alex Salmond was cleared of all charges.
80.
In May 2021 The Times reported that Alex Salmond was writing a book about his trial.
81.
On 26 March 2021, Alex Salmond announced he had joined and become leader of the Alba Party, a new pro-independence party, to contest the upcoming 2021 Scottish Parliament Election.
82.
The party won zero seats but Alex Salmond pledged the party would continue campaigning.
83.
Alex Salmond claimed that the party had established itself as a political force in only six weeks and would remain on the political scene.
84.
Alex Salmond said that the proposed 2023 independence referendum would need to take place, but if it did not, then there would be huge political change in Scotland, in which Alba would play a strong part.
85.
Alex Salmond is a member of the Church of Scotland and considers himself to be a religious man.
86.
Alex Salmond succeeded Robin Cook as a racing tipster for Glasgow's Herald newspaper.
87.
Alex Salmond takes an interest in Scottish cultural life, as well as watching Star Trek and listening to country music.
88.
Alex Salmond has been awarded several honorary degrees in recognition of his political career.
89.
In November 2007, Alex Salmond received The Spectator's Parliamentarian of the Year award for his "brilliant campaign" and "extraordinary victory" in the Scottish Parliament elections, thereby ending eight years of Labour rule.