THE ALBA Party’s Gourock by-election candidate says there are positives for his side after a ‘difficult’ campaign which was overshadowed by the sudden death of his party leader and close friend Alex Salmond.

Chris McEleny’s bid to be elected as an Inverclyde West councillor ended unsuccessfully last week as Labour’s Ian Hellyer came out on top.

But the former Gourock councillor said he was pleased to see his party’s ‘first preference’ votes increase from 126 in 2022’s council elections to 258 in last week’s poll.

It came after Mr McEleny had to make the decision to put his campaign on hold in the middle of last month following the sudden passing of former First Minister and Alba Party leader Alex Salmond, who he describes as a ‘close friend’ and ‘father figure’.

Despite coming fourth overall in terms of first preference votes, the pro-independence politician said the result was one that his party could be pleased with.

He added: “I think it’s quite a positive result for us.

"People obviously focus on the headline figures, but for Alba as a party who are strategically looking ahead to the next Scottish Parliament elections in a PR [proportional representation] system on first preference votes alone that result would have potentially got us two members elected to parliament in the west of Scotland.

“I’m yet to see the underlying data, but it did seem to me that there was a substantial number of SNP voters who gave Alba their second preference vote.

“If that’s the case we are heading towards quite a good result in 2026..

“In Gourock, it wasn’t to be this time. I had a lot of hopes for what we could deliver for the town again.

"Many of these issues we’ll continue to work on, I don’t need to be in elected office to continue campaigning for better public services, road safety and investment in the town.

“Ian has a few years now to see what he can deliver for Gourock, and I wish him all the best with that.

“If Gourock succeeds, Inverclyde succeeds, and vice versa.”

Mr McEleny said the loss of such an influential figure in his party had been tough to take and added that the disruption that followed due to him flying out of Macedonia to help with Mr Salmond’s repatriation had impacted his campaign

He told the Tele: “It’s been a very difficult campaign for us.

“Alex was planning on coming three or four times to Gourock during this by-election for a series of meetings with the town’s pensioners on the issue of Labour’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment and the SNP Government in Holyrood’s decision to roll out that cut.

“I think we would have made substantially better inroads if we were able to do that, but we never were.

“It was very much a paper candidate for a large proportion of the election, whether it was when I was overseas after he passed, or when we decided to suspend campaigning for well over a week, if not two weeks, at basically the key point of the election.

“But that was just something that everyone decided was the right thing to do.

“I think when we did dust ourselves down and got back out there. We did work hard to try to connect to as many voters as we could, and from 2022’s result we’ve seen a significant increase in support.”