Instead, he reads the new pro-independence newspaper The National, which he encourages several constituents to try out, along with the Press & Journal and The Courier – both of which he writes columns for.

“The rest, I just don’t bother with now,” he says.

In place of the old media, Salmond has turned to social media, and is particularly obsessed with one Twitter parody account of himself, @AngrySalmond. Indeed, he has gone to extraordinary lengths in an attempt to uncover the secret identity of the tweeter.

“I’ve done a bit of a Hercule Poirot on this,” he says. “I had a reunion of my staff ... and I had Angry Salmond up on my phone to see what he was posting. I looked at my staff very carefully to see who was doing suspicious things in their pocket – it was like Shot in the Dark, trying to find out who did it with the candlestick in the library – but everyone I suspect has convincingly denied it.

“I thought it was [STV journalist] Stephen Daisley once, but I checked out his stuff and saw that the sentence structures didn’t match. Anyway, I try not to spend too much time thinking about who Angry Salmond is but now you’ve got me right back into my obsession. Whoever it is is, in my estimation, a genius. I’d really like to find out who it is to offer him or her a job.”

Salmond is also a fan of the slightly more high-brow figure of Robert Burns – whom he calls “the person of the millennium” – and on the day of the interview had written a newspaper column about him. Salmond appears to love all things Scotland: Is there anything Scottish he doesn’t like?

“Of course – the Scottish Daily Mail. But come on, we have faults and foibles in this country. There are things I would like to improve about Scotland. But I love haggis, bagpiping, Burns, and Scottish history.”

Scottish history played a notably low-key role in the referendum because the Yes campaign was reluctant to showcase an overtly masculine Braveheart side of Scottish nationalism. It’s obvious that Salmond, who briefly studied Scottish history at university in St Andrews, would have evoked the memories of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace much more if the decision had been left entirely up to him.

“Bruce came into my mind quite a bit during the referendum campaign,” the former first minister says. “We had the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in the middle of June. Some of my young advisers were very uncomfortable with that association, but I think your soul would have to be dead to not be inspired by it. While I don’t regard David Cameron as Edward Longshanks – for a start, he’s not as able – there are parallels you can draw and things you can learn from history.”

But what about Alex Salmond? In centuries to come, when a young St Andrews student is battling against a deadline and looks up the name of Alex Salmond in the books of Scottish history, what will it say?

“My part in history remains to be written,” says Salmond. “That’s the great thing about history.”