Tom Peterkin: The gloves are off as Alex Salmond lets rip with an extraordinary attack against the UK Supreme Court

WHAT is it about politicians? Give them a historic landslide election victory and an unprecedented majority and they think they can just go off on one – with little regard to the damaging consequences of a petulant outburst.

In the aftermath of his crushing triumph at the polls, Alex Salmond said he recognised that the SNP did not have a "monopoly of wisdom" in a gracious winner's speech that was conciliatory towards his opponents, whom he had just ground into the dust. That sort of attempt at statesmanship now seems to be a distant memory with the extraordinarily intemperate attack that the First Minister has unleashed on Lord Hope and other prominent figures in the legal establishment.

It is well-documented that Salmond has a temper. That in itself is no bad thing. Many ambitious and passionate people are "blessed" with a fiery personality. The problem with this latest manifestation of Salmond's choleric nature was not just that it sounded like a teenage tantrum. Salmond's rant will do nothing other than cause more damage to the Government's relationship with the judiciary.

Perhaps Salmond had got out of the wrong side of his Bute House bed or perhaps his porridge had been served cold and garnished with vitriol the morning he was interviewed by Holyrood magazine. Interestingly, his astute spin doctor Kevin Pringle was on holiday and unable to influence the First Minister before he embarked on his tirade. Whatever the reason for his anger, Salmond's invective was totally over the top when he was asked about the row raging between the Government and the legal establishment over judgements handed down by the UK Supreme Court.

Salmond railed against Lord Hope, one of two Scottish judges sitting in the UK Supreme Court, claiming that his rulings were allowing the "vilest people on the planet" to win compensation. One can almost hear the sarcasm dripping from Salmond's voice with his follow-up remark in which he has a go at Lord Hope suggesting that the First Minister had misunderstood the law on the issue. "I am perfectly happy if Lord Hope wishes to exercise his freedom of speech and I hope he is happy with mine," Salmond told the magazine. "But at least I went to the bother of being elected. It may be an inconvenience but none the less has to count for something."

His tone was such that one cannot help but think that Salmond's newly-won majority has given him a sense of superiority over an unelected judiciary.

But attacking judges only serves to undermine an already rocky relationship and detracts from the serious points Salmond wants to make about the Cadder ruling and the Nat Fraser case. When taken with Kenny MacAskill's "he who pays the piper calls the tune" threat to withhold Scotland's share of Supreme Court funding, it seems that any notion of humility in victory is no more.