Alex Salmond’s wife, Moira Salmond, would be Scotland’s first first lady if the country’s “Yes” vote works out the way supporters hope it will.
Results from the referendum are scheduled to be announced at 7 a.m. GMT on Friday after a full day of voting on Thursday.
Moira, 76 or 77, has been dubbed Moira, Queen Of Scots, and often spends time in the hamlet of Strichen--population 1,200--instead of Bute House, the country’s equivalent of 10 Downing Street, reported the Daily Express.
I don’t think she’s madly keen on Bute House because you can’t move around in it as normal,” says Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review Of Books who knows the Salmonds well.
“There’s always some kind of security guard or official person there so you can’t really relax in your own house.”
In Strichen the Salmonds own a four-bedroom converted mill on the banks of the Ugie river.
“I do get lonely when he’s away all week in Westminster,” she said shortly after her husband was first elected.
“So our time alone together is very precious. We drive up to Strichen on a Friday and like to potter around the cottage, having meals by the fire and a leisurely fry-up on a Sunday morning.”
Moira is a very private person, sometimes appearing with her husband in public but giving her last known interview back in 1990, according to the Independent. “Most people in Scotland have no idea what she looks like,” it remarked.
Apparently, in her first and last interview, “her greatest revelation concerned the inconvenience – familiar to MPs – of living in two places at once.”
“Sometimes I go to make a cheese-and-tomato toastie in Linlithgow, absolutely sure I’ve got a pound of cheese in the fridge, then I remember it’s in the fridge in Strichen!” she was quoted as saying. After Salmond was made fun of for a while, the couple decided that she wouldn’t give an interview again.
