Alex Salmond has launched a blistering assault on Nick Robinson, after the outgoing BBC political editor compared Scotland during the independence referendum to “Putin’s Russia”.
Mr Salmond said that Mr Robinson should be embarrassed and ashamed of his reporting of the campaign. It was ironic, he added, that Mr Putin’s name had come up, since the BBC’s referendum coverage was most commonly compared to Pravda, the Communist newspaper in the Soviet era.
The former SNP leader added that he had been reluctant to criticise Mr Robinson, who has cancer, but was appalled by remarks he made last week. Speaking at the Edinburgh book festival, the journalist had spoken of the “intimidation and bullying” of journalists during the campaign.
A year ago Mr Robinson was accused by Yes campaign supporters of bias after a confrontation with Mr Salmond over the BBC’s coverage of a story about the possible relocation of RBS. The spat at a press conference in Edinburgh resulted in thousands of Yes supporters assembling outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow to call for his resignation.
Mr Robinson said the episode was “a source of regret” but added: “Alex Salmond was using me to change the subject. Alex Salmond was using me as a symbol; a symbol of the wicked, metropolitan, Westminster classes sent from England, sent from London, in order to tell the Scots what they ought to do.”
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Writing in the Dundee Courier, Mr Salmond dismissed “auld Nick’s” remarks. He said: “The BBC’s coverage of the Scottish referendum was a disgrace. It can be shown to be so, as was Nick’s own reporting, of which he should be both embarrassed and ashamed.”
He went on: “To compare, as Nick did last week, 4,000 Scots peacefully protesting outside BBC Scotland as something akin to Putin’s Russia is as ludicrous as it is insulting.”
Other journalists who witnessed the incident when the pair fell out believe that the then SNP leader manipulated the confrontation.