In a helicopter above Inverness, Alex Salmond was talking about life, death and friendship on his three cities tour of the Highlands a week before the independence referendum. News had just reached him that the Rev Dr Ian Paisley had died and Scotland’s first minister, until then garrulous and expansive, was silent for a little while before talking fondly of Ulster’s old Protestant defender. “I liked big Ian,” he said. “I got to see something about him that others rarely did.” Earlier, he had spoken of his great affection for Cardinal Thomas Winning. “I don’t think the Catholic church in Scotland has ever really recovered from his death.” There haven’t been many in this world who could count both Ian Paisley and Thomas Winning as his friends.

Salmond’s reminiscences about each were more than mere glib anecdotes of a statesman eager to convey something of the circles in which he moved. He became a confidant to both at critical times in their lives and, though he isn’t a religious man, it became clear that the faith of each of these two Christian leaders had left an imprint on him. Perhaps too, through these vignettes, he was trying to signal something else that spoke of inclusiveness and reaching out and building bridges. In these the final days of his seven-year tenure as Scotland’s first minister you wonder if it’s in these areas that the Scotland Salmond led has truly flourished.

You’d have to be a particularly bad first minister to muck up the business of administering Scotland: the country simply doesn’t have enough power and self-determination for a first minster to make a great deal of material difference to the lives of the people he governs. The country must spend what London gives it and there is insufficient tax leverage within that arrangement radically to alter the social attitudes that drive Westminster legislation. Since the birth of the second Scottish parliament in 1999 none of Scotland’s four first ministers was deemed to have been a failure. Of all of them, though, Salmond alone has imposed something of his stamp upon the country.

Despite having to operate with this economic straitjacket, Scotland, during Salmond’s premiership, has managed to decouple itself from the pervading social and cultural attitudes that lately seem to have underpinned the Westminster consensus. Scotland, in the words of its great historian professor Sir Tom Devine, has become comfortable in its own skin. The rights and aspirations of our minorities are now enshrined in Scotland’s still evolving unwritten constitution to a degree that was beyond our collective imagination less than a generation ago.

Anywhere you care to look across this land, the rights of our ethnic groups, the LGBT community and members of faith groups to be treated as equals and to be protected from discrimination are sacrosanct. Our elderly and infirm have free care and all Scots, regardless of background or income, can have access to our finest universities. The Irish Catholic community, perhaps for the first time, is now finally happy to be Scottish first and anything else second. Around 54% of us voted yes in the referendum.

There have been missed opportunities. Many will point to the increase in the numbers of children living in poverty and in those seeking the help of food banks to feed their families, but there’s little you can do when Westminster imposes an austerity programme that punishes the poor, turns a blind eye to banking corruption and lightens the burdens of the rich yet more.

One of the keys to unlocking the potential of those in our marginalised communities is in radical reform of secondary education. For this to happen, control of our comprehensive schools must be wrested back from the baleful influence of the teaching unions. The gap in attainment between poor pupils and affluent ones has increased in the last seven years.

In business, not enough has been done to address the issue of why so many Scottish SMEs are frozen out of public sector contracts due to a civil service that lacks imagination and desire to help them work creatively within European procurement legislation. And surely it was an error of judgment to deploy the SNP’s overall majority after 2011 by choosing to overload Holyrood’s committees with nationalist back-markers? These are the politics of suspicion and tribalism and were unworthy of the outgoing first minister.

History, though, will be kind to Alex Salmond for it will credit him with being the architect of the most profound and radical shift in Scotland’s politics since the birth of democracy. In his 20 years at the helm of the SNP – barely a single generation – the party has evolved from being a hit-and-hope party favoured by tartan and heather romanticists to the nation’s natural party of government. More than this, he has all but destroyed the Labour party in Scotland, though he has been aided in this by its own hopelessness, fecklessness and complacency.

In the dismal argot of the American high street, Salmond has made the SNP the go-to party for Scots on the democratic left. He has achieved this by skilfully creating a narrative that cast Scottish Labour as the branch office of Westminster long before Johann Lamont uttered the phrase.

A couple of weeks ago, I returned to my old school, St Ninian’s in Kirkintilloch, to discuss politics and the independence referendum with modern studies and history students. A rudimentary straw poll of around 30 of them revealed 100% support for independence, this in a catchment area with very strong Labour party roots. It was astonishing evidence of Salmond and the SNP having found a route to the Holy Grail of international politics: the support of young people. These students have yet to cast their first parliamentary vote and previously we had imagined that not until they made their first mortgage repayment would they be interested in the manner in which their country is run.

The social, political and cultural landscape of Scotland has changed for good – and that is mainly down to Alex Salmond.