ALTHOUGH never a political reporter when I was on the tools, I frequently found myself covering that beat on the understanding that no journalist should ever refuse an assignment.

I would open my reporter's notebook on many stories about the day-to-day running of Scotland and what the future held for her.

As part of that brief I spent much time in the company of two men, former First Ministers of Scotland, who have been rightly given the soubriquet of colossus.

Donald Dewar was a man I liked very much and someone who was clearly no intellectual slouch. He was taken too young, as was his friend and political rival, Alex Salmond.

Devolution was the main topic for Dewar in my time and independence was Salmond's and a decade and more ago I trogged round Scotland with the latter and his team and got to know him very well.

He too knew his onions and was fascinating to be around. His oratorial skills were immense and I never once saw him outgunned by a journalist or suffer anything remotely approaching lassitude.

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Prior to his taking up office at Holyrood he was a popular and effective constituency MP, a role I saw at first hand.

In 1997 I was despatched by my newsdesk to Peterhead after the sinking of a local fishing boat, the Sapphire, with the loss of four crew.

My father's family hailed from Lossiemouth and were fisherfolk so I well knew the closeness of these communities. So did Salmond, the Banff and Buchan MP.

When Labour shipping minister, and former Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson, refused to mount a salvage operation, Salmond spearheaded a half-million pound fund-raising campaign to do it instead.

Originally an oil industry economist, Salmond used his contacts in the business to hire a huge recovery vessel to raise the boat from the seabed and return the men's bodies to their families.

Many years later I was hired to play the part of a journalist in a huge exercise designed to test the response of the emergency services and local authorities to a nuclear accident on the M8.

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Shortly before it was due to start, the exercise director realised that he had not earmarked anyone to be the First Minister.

He turned to me and told me to get briefed for the role. This I did and gave my best effort at running a country in crisis over the next two days.

It was fun, but even though I was well aware of what the First Minister would say and do in each circumstance, pretending to be Alex Salmond was very challenging.

I did my best, but I know I never came close to being the man. He clearly had his Rabelasian faults but he was driven, focussed and above everything else, a Scottish patriot.