Sturgeon: Salmond happier for SNP to be destroyed than succeed without him
She said her relationship with the late politician began to deteriorate as soon as she became leader of Scotland.
Mr Salmond, who died last year, quit as SNP leader and first minister in 2014 after the Scottish independence referendum.
Ms Sturgeon also claims in her book that Mr Salmond had admitted to her that the 'substance' of one of the sexual harassment complaints had been true.
The former Alba Party leader was acquitted of all charges relating to the allegations at court in 2020, while a judicial review found the Scottish Government's own investigation of him was tainted with apparent bias.
Ms Sturgeon said her former mentor had created a conspiracy theory about Scotland's core democratic institutions to shield himself from accountability. She said Mr Salmond never produced a 'shred of evidence' to support these claims.
She accused him of trying to 'distort' and 'weaponise' the trauma of victims.
In her book, which was on sale in some places ahead of schedule on Monday, she said: 'In his (Salmond's) efforts to turn himself into the wronged person, he demonstrated that nothing and no one was sacrosanct for him.
'There was never the merest hint of concern about the damage he did to the party he previously led.
'Indeed, it felt to me that he would have rather destroyed the SNP than see it succeed without him.'
She accused her former boss of having 'impugned the integrity' of the institutions 'at the heart of Scottish democracy', including the Government, Police Scotland and Crown Office.
She went on: 'The fact that he never produced a shred of credible evidence that a conspiracy existed, because it didn't, wasn't enough to stop him seeking to damage the reputation of these institutions and shatter the morale of those who worked in them.
'He was prepared to traumatise, time and again, the women at the centre of it all.
'A jury concluded that what they experienced wasn't criminal, but that does not mean those experiences didn't happen.
'Even if he never said so explicitly, he was accusing them of being liars, of making it all up.'
The former SNP leader said Mr Salmond had made his former allies and SNP colleagues 'mortal enemies' in the fallout over misconduct claims against him.
'In that regard,' she wrote, 'I was clearly public enemy number one. For a while, I told myself that the bonds between us would be stronger than his thirst for revenge.
'Eventually, though, I had to face the fact that he was determined to destroy me.
'I was now engaged in mortal political combat with someone I knew to be both ruthless and highly effective.
'It was a difficult reality to reconcile myself to.
'So too was losing him as a friend. I went through what I can only describe as a grieving process.
'For a time after we stopped speaking, I would have conversations with him in my head about politics and the issues of the day.
'I had occasional, but always vivid, dreams in which we were still on good terms. I would wake up from these feeling utterly bereft.'
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If you accept the 'we must have strong support' argument then success or failure rests on the next 10% of the population that gets us from 50% to 60%. Hardly any of that group of people have ever voted SNP. The SNP have never achieved 50% of the votes cast in a General Election in their existence. Why are we targeting our key voters with a political party they have serially refused to support? On top of that, there is one thing worse than a politician to send out to win over voters, and that is a politician from a party which has been in power for an extended period of time. You cannot disentangle those politicians from the track record of their government. A politician may well want to talk to a voter about independence, but the voter may well want to talk about schools, or hospital waiting lists, or ferries. Plus, there is always a good electoral reason for a political party to not promote independence. Remember when, in 2019, the SNP clearly decided that 'stopping Brexit' was a bigger vote winner than arguing for independence? That will always happen. Once again, this isn't an anti-SNP thing. There are very, very few instances of single parties getting majority support in multi-party parliamentary elections, any party would have a built-in self-interest in not promoting independence at some point or other, and it's not that the SNP's politicians are uniquely unpopular, it's that they are just normally unpopular. There is virtually no civic movement left. We don't have prominent leaders in their professions or communities who regularly act as public advocates of independence. The power-hoarding of the politicians has resulted in the long, slow death of the 2014 coalition. It will need to be rebuilt from scratch. We're stuck because we've been saying twe won't convert the public to independence until after someone gives us a referendum and that we're going to get that by making independence a politicians-only zone. Both pillars of this argument are false, yet those have been the sole terms of debate for a decade now. We have explored every avenue of how to skip the consent-building phase and jump to the legislative process stage through party politics and we've not found a way to do it – because there isn't a way to do it. It means we didn't do an autopsy on the 2014 defeat because it wasn't politically expedient – so we've learned nothing. It means we haven't examined the views of voters – so we don't know our audience. It means we haven't communicated to voters in a meaningful or consistent way – so all they've heard is politicians on the BBC. In these two articles, I have not set out my strategy for Scottish independence – you can find that in detail in my book. Sorted. Sadly, we're still pretty far from a credible discussion of strategy. I fear we will waste another year until after the Scottish election. Because frankly, if we're really in a phase where a political party polling at about 30% demands a vote of over 50% as a condition for progress, we're not a serious proposition. It didn't work when the SNP were at their peak and it certainly won't work now. This is all maddening. There is compelling evidence that our target voters are increasingly ready to listen to a fresh pitch on independence. If so, the timescale for getting from 50% to 60% support is not long. Then, if we had 60% of public support, lots and lots of possible avenues to independence open up, with a referendum only being one of them. So what are we going to do? One more shot at finding a loophole in the rules that will let us escape the UK without winning over the public? Two more shots? Or something different? We'll have to choose soon.
