Nicola Sturgeon says she still misses Alex Salmond
Following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh in 2020, Mr Salmond was cleared of all 13 charges, which included attempted rape and sexual offences.
In an exclusive interview with ITV News before the publication of her memoir Frankly on Thursday August 14, Ms Sturgeon said she misses the relationship she used to have with her mentor.
Alex Salmond died in October last year (Robert Perry/PA)
And she said she was hit by a 'wave of grief' after hearing of his death in October last year.
Speaking to ITV News at Ten presenter Julie Etchingham, she said: 'Even today I still miss him in some way, the person that I used to know and the relationship we used to have.
'But I thought I had made my peace with it, that I'd got to a point where I felt nothing.
'And then I got a call to tell me that Alex Salmond had died. I started crying on the phone and I just was hit by this wave of grief… and it was complicated because obviously we weren't just no longer friends, we were political enemies.
'There was no prospect I was going to be able to go to his funeral or anything like that and it was a kind of strange, strange feeling.'
Mr Salmond went on to become leader of the Alba Party, which became a frequent critic of his former party the SNP.
He died suddenly of a heart attack in October in North Macedonia at the age of 69.
Ms Sturgeon, who succeeded him as Scotland's first minister in 2014, said: 'At the point he died, I hadn't spoken to him for years.
'I felt really deeply the loss of the relationship with him. I suddenly didn't have him. He wasn't there. I couldn't talk to him. And I went through this period of I would still talk to him in my head.
'I would have vivid dreams that we were still on good terms. And then I'd have this feeling of such sadness when I remembered the reality.
'So, I went through that process. I still missed him in some bizarre way.'
During the interview Ms Sturgeon is also asked by Ms Etchingham about her description of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as 'odious' in her memoir.
Nicola Sturgeon debating with then Ukip leader Nigel Farage in 2015 (Stefan Rousseau/PA)
She said: 'This is my impression, other people might have a different view of him. He just comes across as somebody who's got a very, very fragile ego.
'Somebody who's not particularly comfortable, particularly around women.
'In the 2015 leaders debate just before we went on air that night, I just remember hearing him tell somebody how much he'd had to drink, in the green room area beforehand, and it just felt this kind of bravado and just not very pleasant.'
Reform UK has been approached for comment.
Nicola Sturgeon: The Interview will broadcast on Monday August 11 at 7pm on ITV1, ITVX & STV.
An extended version of the interview will be available on ITVX in the following days.
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She said her infamous falling out with her predecessor was a 'bruising episode' of her life as she accused Mr Salmond of creating a 'conspiracy theory' to defend himself from reckoning with misconduct allegations, of which he was cleared in court. Ms Sturgeon said her former mentor was 'never able to produce a shred of hard evidence that he was' the victim of a conspiracy. Nicola Sturgeon accused Alex Salmond of creating a conspiracy to shield himself from his reckoning with his own behaviour (Robert Perry/PA) She went on: 'All of which begs the question: how did he manage to persuade some people that he was the wronged party, and lead others to at least entertain the possibility? 'In short, he used all of his considerable political and media skills to divert attention from what was, for him, the inconvenient fact of the whole business. 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