Alex Salmond is not only Scotland's First Minister but he also happens to be my Member of Parliament at Westminster, drawing a double salary as both a Member of the Scottish Parliament and a Westminster MP. When Salmond was elected into Scotland's Holyrood Parliament I assumed, as probably did others, that he would resign his Westminster seat and that a by-election would be called. That was clearly a naive assumption on my part. Nothing of the sort happened.

Yet nobody in Scotland is complaining. Nobody seems to care. And there lies the problem. Not only has the Scottish National Party obtained its position of power by default --through a wholesale disaffection of the electorate with Brown's Nu Labor-- it increasingly looks like Scottish nationalism has given way to a crude form of personality cult clumsily described as Salmondism. In a Parliament of numpties it appears that Our Eck --as Ian Bell of the Glasgow Herald refers to him-- can do no wrong while he goes busily about grinding all political opposition into dust. Well, it was never much of an opposition anyway, but Our Eck must be given the kudos for guile and outfoxing. He really has run circles around the Parcel of Thieves who today still insist that Scotland should remain in a corrupt and decadent union-turned-banana republic now run jointly by Brussels and Washington, DC.

Only this. While it is one thing --and even to be admired-- to see him outmanoeuvre the unionists it is quite another to see how he continually pulls the wool over the eyes of his fellow Scots. And that he most certainly does. Here is just one example of how Our Eck, while saying one thing actually does the very opposite: both he and the SNP leadership are very noisy in their condemnation of the Blair Government for having taken Britain into an illegal war in Iraq. They however, it should be noted, are quite happy to accept the cosmetic pretence of a similar war in Afghanistan, claiming that this was legally sanctioned by the United Nations.

Which leads me to conclude that he and the SNP must be ignorant about international law. Neither the United Nations or its Security Council have any authority to declare war against another nation. Economic sanctions yes, war no.

So we begin to see how the SNP policy about Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing more than ill-constructed posturing. While they court the popular vote which disapproves of the former they really have no interest in what is little more than a secret war in central Asia about which the average Scot has little to say. But dig a little deeper into the politics of Salmondism and it gets far murkier. For here is a man who appears to have little time for either international or national law, who appears happy to overturn the very laws that he and his cronies in Westminster have made.

Recently, I wrote to Our Eck as one of his constituents asking for his approval of my intention, as a supporter of the Make Wars History campaign, to make a complaint to my local constabulary of the various acts of war criminality committed by Messrs Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and others as outlined by the International Criminal Court Act (Scotland) of 2001. What followed was a series of correspondence in which Salmond dodged and ducked and dived out of either addressing the legal issue or giving it the slightest commitment. No, he wasn't prepared to support what he called "a campaign against Tony Blair" which would result "in hours of wasted police time" and a single-issue campaign which a political party couldn't support.

All this is nonsense, of course. Make Wars History is not a campaign against any one politician. Rather it is a popular campaign to ensure that the existing laws against wars and war criminality are upheld by nations and societies that claim to respect the Rule of Law. It seems that an inveterate politico like Salmond is simply unable to understand that. Which bodes ill for a Scotland ruled by one who has no interest in the Rule of Law. Nor would such a campaign lead to a waste of police time since multiple complaints to a given constabulary would merely be collated together. And why shouldn't a political party that huffs and puffs so publicly about illegal wars then not be expected to support a campaign aimed precisely at prosecuting the warmongers?

"You can't seriously expect the man to support this," you might say. "It would be political suicide for him or indeed something even worse of the like of what happened to Robin Cooke." True enough, it could be a very dangerous thing for a politician in a US satellite colony to bite the hand that feeds him in Washington, DC or indeed at the Westminster club where there is an unwritten rule that whilst one can posture and expel hot air it really isn't the done thing to point to other rogues and accuse them of criminality. So, all in all, while politicians may talk about war crimes they can't be expected to support legal action against such.

Which is tough on us as it is on politicians. Because by not doing so they not only undermine the very legislation for which they were responsible, in this case the ICC Act of 2001, but they end up being renegades no different to a Hitler, Mussolini or George Bush against the Rule of Law. Worse actually. They become complicit in the war crimes they will not resist. And so do we all.

Pretty heavy stuff, eh? You can see why Our Eck would take every form of evasive action available. Never mind about complicity. After all, nobody is really going to notice what a lone, eccentric constituent or a minor blogger is going to say. But that's the sad thing about the world of political images, smoke and mirrors in which Our Eck lives. There was a way in which he could have fulfilled his role as an MP while still playing the game of political expediency. He could have done what certain other MSPs have done by just quietly making it known that he would be only too happy to support a constituent's complaint to the police by ensuring that it was taken seriously and followed through. But he didn't.

Now, you could put this down to either ineptitude or to expediency. But as we can see the latter could have been easily served without his having to dig himself into a hole. So that leaves us with the question, while leaving aside all expectations of integrity or morality which in any case one should never expect from a creature so low and of disrepute as a politician, is Scotland's maximum leader really quite so bright as we are led to think he is that it has taken this to show that our would-be Emperor is devoid of the slightest moral vestige of clothing?