AN SNP MSP has branded party colleagues’ treatment of former leader Alex Salmond as “pathetic and “shameful.”

Writing in The Times newspaper in the wake of the former first minister’s fatal heart attack on Saturday, Fergus Ewing said the party Mr Salmond “led to victory turned against him and quite literally erased him from their history.”

He added: “He made them. They in turn spurned and shunned him.

“It was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic and it was shameful.”

In a thinly veiled attack on former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Mr Ewing referenced the claims of serious charges — including attempted rape — that Mr Salmond faced and was cleared of in 2020, saying they were part of a “plot.”

Mr Ewing continued: “In the so-called tributes from some in the leadership over the past few sad says, not one single word of contrition has been uttered for this ugliest of defenestrations.

“He was the subject of what I believe was a concerted campaign by some of the ‘top’ people in the land.”

A “malevolent and wicked campaign” he argued could have ended with Mr Salmond having “died in a prison cell.”