INTRODUCING First Minister Alex Salmond at an SNP party conference ahead of the 2014 independence referendum, his deputy Nicola Sturgeon revealed that her mentor, who was looking leaner and healthier, had been on “the same diet as Beyoncé”. The audience laughed. It was a typical quip from Sturgeon, for whom the elder statesman was not only a political meteor whose path she hoped to follow, but her trusted mentor. Photos from that era show the pair looking relaxed and easy in each other’s company. Like siblings or cousins, they might not have agreed on every issue, and their personalities and style were completely different, but they nevertheless had a strong and affectionate bond.

How long ago that all now seems. In the wake of Salmond accusing members of the Scottish government and the SNP - including Sturgeon’s husband - of plotting against him “to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned”, this following a court case in which he was acquitted of all 13 charges of sexual assault against him, they are now as distant from each other as north and south poles. Their relationship is as icy and unforgiving too.

The word Shakespearean is often loosely applied to political dramas, but in the case of the Salmond-Sturgeon rift, it is spot on. A sense of betrayal underlies their fury: Salmond, that his former protégé conspired, as he sees it, in throwing him to the wolves, Sturgeon that he dared question her integrity.

While this fight is personally wounding to each, its ramifications have also inflicted a serious blow to the party. Potentially, the scandal of their squabble could stall the momentum towards Scottish independence. It remains to be seen, at the forthcoming Holyrood elections in May, whether this most unedifying and unpleasant public wrangle has resulted in merely a glancing strike to the SNP and other nationalists’ hopes, or if it will prove lethal.

Political liaisons are similar in some respects to a marriage. When once close partners grow apart, the mood can turn rancorous. Recrimination and resentment reverberate down the years. We need only recall the camaraderie of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in the run-up to the Labour Party’s heyday in the 1990s. Prior to the sudden death of the party leader John Smith in 1994, it was assumed that Brown, the more experienced of the two, would become his successor. Within hours of Smith’s death, however, Blair, encouraged by his wife Cherie, decided to run for the post. The party was of the same mind, as a poll in the Scotsman newspaper revealed. Rather than split the vote, Brown reluctantly ceded to Blair. It was rumoured the friends made a pact, by which Blair would become leader, and in due course hand over to Brown. Until that day arrived Brown, as Blair’s consigliere, would remain at the top table, whether in opposition or, as it transpired, in Downing Street, where for many years he proved a formidable and disruptive Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The ill-will that this swift decision caused between Blair and Brown never faded. During Blair’s years as Prime Minister, Brown was like a sullen cloud that hovered permanently over his head. When, eventually, Blair stood down and Brown became PM, the outcome was sadly predictable. The chancellorship had been his natural métier, the position where he shone. Temperamentally, being moody, brooding and occasionally ill-tempered, he was not suited to the job. Under his tenure at Number 10, Labour struggled. In a short time, he conceded a General Election to the Conservatives, and decamped north to his Scottish seat in Fife.

With Blair regarded by Brown’s close allies as a prime example of ‘et tu Brutus’, the impact of this so-called back-stabbing on British politics was seismic. Blair’s charisma and his popular New Labour ethos led his party to three terms in power. It is doubtful whether Brown could have achieved that.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum is another spectacular falling out, that of Conservative leadership rivals Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Despite their wildly diverging personalities – Johnson a blustering womaniser, Gove a bit of a geek - they forged an unlikely alliance during the Leave campaign that took Britain out of Europe. What followed was more pantomime than Bard of Avon. These uneasy Brexit bedfellows stood on the same podium to urge voters to sever the ties across the Channel, a stance adopted, many suspected, solely to advance their careers.

The tactics they used to persuade switherers can be seen, in retrospect, as symptomatic of their moral backbone, or lack thereof. With the Leave vote in the bag, and prime minister David Cameron obliged to resign, party infighting for his replacement came to resemble polecats in a sack. On the eve of Johnson declaring his candidacy, Gove suddenly announced he was not up to the position, and threw his own hat into the ring. Johnson immediately pulled out of the race. Described as a ‘Very British Betrayal’, the rupture between the oddest couple in the country came as no great surprise.

Nor was it unpredictable that, in years to come, they appeared to make up, or at least pretend amity had been restored. What Westminster would have been like had Gove taken the helm can only be surmised. More shambolic than under Johnson? Impossible to say. Would the pandemic have been better handled? Perhaps, but again, we will never know.

Infighting, treachery and long-held grudges run through political life, the marrow in its bones. Some are of merely private significance, others could have constitutional consequences. That is the fear with the Sturgeon-Salmond debacle. Already it has split the party. Supporters are choosing sides, creating a worrying sense of male versus female partisanship. That Scotland’s future could be determined by a political parting of the ways between two of its finest politicians is the ultimate irony.

(Rosemary Goring is a journalist, writer and editor. Her books include Scotland: The Autobiography, Scotland: Her Story and the novels After Flodden and Dacre’s War. She is currently writing a book about Mary, Queen of Scots, and lives in the Scottish Borders, closer to England than Edinburgh.)

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