Confronting the truth about Alex Salmond

The most important part of the afterlife, according to ancient Egyptians, took place in the Hall of Maat. There, recently departed souls would be faced with a scale on which to put their heart. On the other side was a feather; if the heart weighed more, it would be devoured by the goddess Amit, destroying the person’s soul in the process. If the heart balanced with the feather, the deceased would join Osiris in paradise.

The society we’re living in today is a rather more agnostic one, but that doesn’t mean that the idea of weighing souls has no place in it. Whenever someone famous or important dies, we stop for a moment to consider the texture of their lives. Sure, no-one had anything bad to say about Maggie Smith the other week but, often, it turns out that people were complicated.

Can writing ever be so good that it trumps charges of antisemitism? How many great movies can a person make in order to be absolved of the sins they committed in their personal life? Should a Nazi sympathiser deserve to be remembered only as a fashion icon? And so on, and so forth. Like Anubis, we place the heart on the scale and watch carefully to see if it moves.

Alex Salmond died last week, and his heart was immediately put on the scale. What were we to make of the former Scottish First Minister?

He changed the trajectory of Scottish and British politics forever, no-one could argue with that. He transformed the Scottish National Party, and led millions to think about their relationship with the union. He was a character; one of those figures who always seemed ever so slightly larger than life. There is no-one else like him in Holyrood, or Westminster for that matter. These are the facts everyone can agree on. The rest is complicated.

Alex Salmond died over the weekend and suddenly Twitter was awash with tributes from politicians and journalists – most of them male, a few of them not. Of course, not everyone agreed with him on independence and hey, he really could be a scoundrel at times, but wasn’t he a true titan of politics? Wasn’t he a jolly good lunch companion? Wasn’t he often so charismatic that you couldn’t help but warm to him? On and on it went – anecdotes about unwise boozing, comical phone calls and half-remembered barbs. The elephant in the room, meanwhile, silently looked on.

Alex Salmond faced allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape, brought forward by multiple women. By the time the story broke, rumours about his behaviour had already been floating around British politics for many years. During the trial, his own defence described him as “touchy feely” and admitted that he would sometimes act inappropriately. In his closing speech, his QC said that his client “could certainly have been a better man”.

He wasn’t found guilty in the end but, to be very blunt, this does not mean he wasn’t guilty of horrific behaviour towards a string of women. It is possible that the truth will come out now he is gone and it is possible it will not. The only thing to safely say at this stage is that, especially in the case of sexual assault against women, a “not guilty” verdict doesn’t tell us a whole lot. There are many women I know who took their rapist to court and ended up losing; I suspect that many other women could name countless more.

The system isn’t fit for purpose, but that’s a different issue. What we can and should say now is that there remains too much uncertainty around Alex Salmond for him to have been eulogised in this way. That he was spoken about so nicely and by so many only confirms what many women know and fear: that violence against us just doesn’t matter. It is a fact of life and people will, on occasion, pretend to care but when it comes to putting a man’s heart on the scale, the way he treated women will simply not come into play.

The one silver lining we ought to hold onto is that the old gods aren’t the ones in charge of the feather anymore. It is up to us to decide what did and didn’t matter, when we take it upon ourselves to look back on someone’s life. The reaction to Salmond’s passing was infuriating but there will be more men like him. There always are. When their time comes, we can only hope that their actions – all of them – will succeed in tipping the scale.