The best advice Alex Salmond said he has ever received was from his grandfather – who told him that if he ever wanted to say something radical, to say it while wearing a suit.
He said it was a good, solid piece of advice that had served him well in life.
“Then again, Moira would say that the best piece of advice came from my granny,” he chuckled.
“Before politics, I was being interviewed on the telly talking about the economy and my hair was out of place.
“My granny said to Moira ‘his hair is out of place, that reflects on you Moira’ – which Moira has never forgotten.
“Whether that was good advice or bad advice, it was certainly unfair. But my granny was a shrewd woman and spoke her mind.”
Mr Salmond adds that his grandfather, Sandy, was without doubt one of the biggest influences in his life.
“He shaped my character, absolutely,” he said.
As the town plumber of Linlithgow, his grandson looked up to him and would follow him around on jobs as his “wee apprentice”.
Even when he became first minister, his grandfather’s advice stuck – especially when it came to the Edinburgh Trams.
He remembers an occasion many years ago when some plumbers asked for his grandfather’s help as they could not find a set of drains under the street.
“They said ‘Sandy, we can’t find the drains. We’ve been looking for them and they’re not where they’re meant to be’,” he recalls.
His grandfather replied that the drains had been moved in 1936, to make way for a new development.
“The point is that Linlithgow is an ancient medieval town, and nothing was where it was meant to be,” explains Mr Salmond.
“Edinburgh is a medieval town too, so I knew as soon as soon as they started digging it up that nothing would be where they thought it was.”
Mr Salmond gets increasingly agitated as he talks about Edinburgh’s trams, and the fact that a bit of old fashioned common sense could have solved a lot of problems.
“Now that wasn’t the only thing wrong with the Edinburgh Trams,” he concedes.
“But I’m sure that when the inquiry gets going, they will discover things went wrong because they kept digging the road up and nothing was where it was meant to be.”