Alex Salmond has been accused of total hypocrisy by the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel Goldie, for forgetting he enjoyed a long informal coalition with the Conservatives before his landslide election victory.

Goldie, who forged a close working relationship with Salmond as Scottish Tory leader between 2007 and 2011, said the first minister was guilty of double standards for repeatedly attacking Labour's coalition with the Tories in the anti-independence campaign.

Goldie said: "When his political fate depended on us, he didn't think twice before seeking and taking our support. It is quite extraordinary that he's now doing a complete volte-face and now proclaims that the Tories are the worst things on the earth.

"To hear him now dismissing the Tories as the pariah of politics, as the name that dare not be spoken, is to me just utterly incredible and utterly hypocritical."

Salmond has repeatedly attacked Labour for "getting into bed with the Tories" in their pro-UK coalition, focusing on significant levels of anger and resentment among Labour voters over austerity policies.

Those attacks are in part behind the sharp surge in support for independence among Labour voters, which has forced a panicked the UK Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to return to Scotland on Wednesday to mount an emergency effort to stem the flow of Labour votes towards yes.

Salmond ran a minority government from 2007 to 2011, but relied heavily on the Tories to pass all four of his annual budgets – including his budget in the first year of the Tory-led government at Westminster in 2011, with total spending over that time worth about £120bn.

In return for that support, he agreed with the Tories to introduce some of the most popular policies of his first term, helping him to a landslide victory in the 2011 Scottish elections.

The Tories enjoyed the deal because it helped them prove their support for the devolved parliament, after their popularity was heavily hit by their vigorous opposition to devolution until 1997.

The SNP is also in coalition with the Tories in at least one Scottish council, South Ayrshire, and has been in multi-party coalitions with the Conservatives and other parties several times since taking power in 2007.

The unofficial coalition with Goldie's party in the Scottish parliament allowed the SNP, which then had only one seat more than Labour, to outvote Labour and the Lib Dems; after the Scottish Green party provoked a brief crisis by refusing to endorse one budget package, only the Tories kept Salmond's budget package afloat.

"The bottom line is that when Alex Salmond needed the Tories he couldn't get enough of our help. When he was in a minority and found it difficult to negotiate anything constructively with Labour, we were able to define areas of policy which appeared in both of our manifestos, where we had a joint approach," Goldie said.

Linda Fabiani, who was Scottish culture secretary during Salmond's first term, said Goldie's intervention was further sign of Tory panic about the referendum.

Fabiani said: "The problem for the no campaign is that nobody in Scotland will be taken in by these desperate attempts to distract attention from the unpopular alliance between the Tories and the Labour leadership – which goes some way to explaining why more and more Labour voters are switching from no to yes.

"It's no wonder that Annabel Goldie is standing up for Alistair Darling after he's acted as the human shield for the Tories throughout the referendum campaign – shamefully defending the disastrous policies which are hitting some of our most vulnerable people hardest and pushing 100,000 more children in Scotland into poverty."