Alex Salmond would rather have seen the SNP “destroyed” than have it succeed without him, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed.
In her memoir, Frankly, the former first minister said she had come to the realisation that her former friend and mentor “wanted to destroy me”.
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.”
Alba Party leader Kenny MacAskill said: “It is Nicola Sturgeon who has demeaned the office of First Minister and who has been shown to be without shame or honour in besmirching a man now dead.
“Alex Salmond was acquitted on all charges and it was Sturgeon’s government which was found to have acted unlawfully unfairly and tainted with apparent bias.
“The break in friendship came from her when she turned on her mentor who had made her politically.
“Shamefully she continued to do so even when he is dead.”
