FORMER First Minister Alex Salmond took centre-stage at the party’s conference weeks before the General Election to mock Tory attempts to portray Ed Miliband as in his pocket.

To massive rounds of applause from the 3,000 delegates packed into the SECC in Glasgow the ex SNP leader argued the depictions were “fundamentally stupid”, ineffectual and predicted they could backfire.

Discussing the Conservatives campaign posters he told delegates it was never a good idea to put a political rival on your party’s election literature.

“I think you should never, ever put your political opponents on your posters ... not because it’s dreadful but because it’s stupid,” he said, admitting that a SNP poster in the 1990s which featured a picture of Michael Forsyth, a former Tory Scottish Secretary, had been a mistake.

“I think the Tory campaign is fundamentally stupid. I don’t think it’s doing Labour any harm and I don’t think it’s doing us any harm whatsoever because the most important thing for the SNP in every Westminster election is to achieve the thing we failed to achieve since 1974 and that’s to achieve relevance in a Westminster election.”

He added: “And listen, folks: nobody can say we are anything other than relevant to this election campaign.’’

The Tory attacks on the SNP and Labour, and the possibility of both parties doing some type of post-election deal, were among the subjects which came up for discussion in the 40 minute session in which the former First Minister read out extracts from his recently published referendum memoirs, The Dream Will Never Die.

He admitted he had some regrets about how the Yes campaign played certain issues during the referendum campaign but insisted he took the “glass half full’’ approach to the outcome.

To cheers from the audience, which included hundreds of new members, some who had joined from the Labour party, he said: “We may have lost the referendum but we are substantially on our way to winning Scotland.”

Salmond admitted that one of the regrets he had about the referendum campaign was not to set out earlier the options for the currency of an independent Scotland.

He said: “In retrospect my only regret about the currency is I should have done earlier what I did in the second television debate, when I laid out the four options that people in Scotland would have.’’

Repeating his criticism of the way the media reported the referendum campaign, the former First Minister said:  “In reality I don’t think the broadcasting issue in terms of how we treat Scotland can be properly resolved until we have been broadcasting under the remit of our democratic parliament in Scotland.’’

But to huge rounds of applause he added that one key development which had resulted from the referendum was the creation of this, The National.

“Some things have changed,” he told delegates.

“At long last we have a daily newspaper in Scotland which supports independence.”

And he added: “Buy The National. That’s a choice most of us here make already and I would urge you to encourage you to ask your friends and neighbours to do the same thing.”

Asked about the circumstances in which Scotland might become independent in the future, he said: “The Scottish National Party is 80-plus years old and for most of that period, for all of it basically, the single biggest stumbling block against the achievement of Scottish independence has not been to convince people that Scotland should be independent but to convince people that there was actually a process by which we could become independent.

“And the biggest gain in that sense from the campaign is we have now what Nicola [Sturgeon] has identified as the gold standard of how Scotland goes from where we are now.

“And that is quite simple, that is in any Scottish election, a political party or parties put in their manifesto a commitment to hold a referendum on independence and then win a majority in that parliament and if that is done then that referendum will be held and if the people of Scotland so judge, Scotland will become an independent country. That is the gold standard.’’

Salmond also told the conference that he expected the number of SNP MPs elected on May 7 to be substantial, but that it was up to the Scottish people.

“In terms of skulduggery and upsetting the apple cart and various parliamentary techniques, I think  a wee bit of experience might be there in the group we have,” he said.

“I think there’s a bit of background which will stand us in good stead.

“But make no mistake, if the SNP, as we did a generation ago, caused a fair amount of parliamentary interest when we were a group of four and five in a parliament of 650, then the very substantial group that we hope goes to Westminster from Scotland I think has an unprecedented opportunity to move politics in a direction of Scotland certainly but also, as Nicola has rightly pointed out, in the direction of progressive politics across these islands."

Meanwhile Salmond has entered into the row over a school’s ban of the award-winning Scottish play Black Watch.

Asked by a schoolgirl at the SNP conference what he thought about the ban, he said: “What it encapsulates is Scotland’s attitude to our military, that we are extraordinary proud of our men and women who fight, but we are also extraordinarily sceptical about war and the politicians who send them to illegal wars.”

The play, written by Gregory Burke, was banned at Webster’s High School in Kirriemuir for containing offensive language.

Head teacher Jane Esson caused controversy when she withdrew the SQA-approved play from the Higher curriculum.

Black Watch has won worldwide acclaim since it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006.