IN 1999, AS then-SNP leader Alex Salmond campaigned in the first Scottish parliamentary elections, he visited Stirling University on a hot summer’s day.
It was so warm that a generous Salmond bought ice cream for his entire campaign team. But as they tucked into their frozen treats something utterly bizarre happened.
Salmond was pictured feeding some of his Solero to this young lady:
“It was done in total innocence but it looked absolutely dreadful,” Salmond said of the infamous picture in a recent interview with TheJournal.ie.
I spent the next week hiding the picture from Mrs Salmond.
The snap did little to harm his political prospects but it has re-emerged in recent times after BuzzFeed began a nationwide search for the lady in the picture.
Reporter Jamie Ross became particularly obsessed with tracking down the woman who became known as ‘Solero Lady’:
It wasn’t just Ross, the picture and the mysterious woman dominated Scottish politics for some months.
It even led to the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson recreating the scene with Ross on a campaign stop in Edinburgh earlier this year:
Salmond takes up the story:
BuzzFeed found this picture, blasted it all over and started a search for this poor lady who had been a student and, bless her, she turned herself in. Obviously BuzzFeed thought she must be a secret amore from the past or something like that.
The woman was not a secret lover but was in fact Kate Adamson, now 33 and married with a young daughter, who told The Herald last May that she was ‘Solero Lady’.
She told the paper how, as a 17-year-old, she had been on a visit to the university with her father, who was campaigning for the SNP, when a photographer approached her and asked if she would pose for a picture with Salmond.
An ice-cream was produced and ‘Solero Lady’ was born. Salmond admits it wasn’t his finest moment.
In my political career there are very few times that I’ve been caught napping by the evil journalists like yourself. But just occasionally, you know what they’re like, they set up a picture which is a less than progressive image of how you would like to be styled.
But the big question is whether he even likes Soleros. To our surprise, the former SNP leader exclusively revealed that he doesn’t.
“That’s probably why I was offering her a bite,” he concludes.
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