When Alex Salmond learnt that he was due to visit Frankfurt for a trade and business meeting, there was one piece of Deutsch-Schottische Freundschaft his office was particularly keen to transact. The first minister wanted to meet the premier of Lower Saxony, one David McAllister. It’s the kind of name perhaps more prevalent in the chartered surveying offices of Perthshire than in the government of Germany’s second-largest federal state, hence Salmond’s evident keenness to head down the Autobahn and play Herr Nice Guy.

As it turns out, though, his meeting with the 38-year-old politician from the ruling Christian Democratic Union probably won’t come to pass. Salmond is in town early in the week when McAllister, the son of a soldier who was raised on Ardbeg Street on Glasgow’s southside, is detained unavoidably in parliament. “I’d be going too far if I said Alex Salmond was known outside political circles here,” says McAllister, before adding: “You might say that’s the diplomatic answer.”

You’re left wondering what common ground Mac, as he is known in Germany, and Salmond might have had anyway. The CDU, led nationally by Angela Merkel, the current German chancellor, is staunchly of the right and has a hardline approach to immigration control. McAllister may be a rising star in German politics, tipped to follow the trajectories of those like Gerhard Schroeder, a former prime minister of Lower Saxony, and Merkel, but it’s scarcely in a fashion that affords much synergy with Salmond’s ambitions.

Rather, McAllister’s principal connection with the politics of Scotland comes from searching YouTube for speeches by Annabel Goldie, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, of whom he is a fan. His political hero is David Cameron: “Every so often I like to look up his website and see if he has any new policies or presentational ideas I can copy.”

He recalls attending a Conservative conference several years back and being particularly impressed by Cameron’s then credo, Vote Blue, Go Green. “Such a very good slogan,” says McAllister sadly. “It is a pity it doesn’t translate into German.”

McAllister’s father, James Buchanan McAllister, was a captain in the 51st Highland Division during the second world war. After the Nazis were defeated, he chose to stay in Germany, eventually marrying a German woman and settling in Berlin.

It’s a background that sensitised McAllister to the recent BNP Question Time furore: “I think the BBC did the right thing there,” he says. “Our experience in Germany has shown us you handle these people in two ways: you try to prevent them speaking, but if you must let them speak you do so in the hope that they unmask themselves.”

McAllister was raised in Berlin, then split down the middle, and became interested in politics at an early age, reading newspapers and watching the news on television. “My mother tells me I gave a speech in my school as a nine-year-old during the general election of 1980,” he says. “The teacher phoned my mother to ask what was happening at home.” McAllister later studied law and served his passage into politics through the students’ parliament, then his local town council.

“It’s difficult to say what my father might have believed politically,” he says. “He left for Germany in 1952, I can’t remember him ever registering to vote in British elections and, as a British citizen, he couldn’t vote in Germany.

“I think he was probably Conservative, as I am in some ways, when it came to foreign policy and security and, because he was a very poorly raised working-class person, Labourite in other areas. The Allies in Germany were encouraged to have no political side, really, therefore my parents never discussed politics, which is why they were so surprised I became involved so early.”

To some extent, though, as McAllister points out, there are material parallels between Lower Saxony and Scotland. The first is a northern state of about 8m people with a coast on the North Sea and an economy reliant on agriculture, biotechnology and light industry. Peat was an economic staple there and, as with Gaelic, there are rural pockets in which Low German, the strain that’s neither so pleasing nor melodious as standard German, continues to be spoken.

However, it was also the crucible of the Saxons, close chums of the Angles, co-founders of the political entity against which Salmond has set his face. Any chit-chat the pair might have shared in Frankfurt would obviously have been conditioned by McAllister’s strong advocacy of his ancestral land’s union with England. “It seems to me there are very good reasons to keep the union,” he says. “Devolution was a right process; it’s certainly something we in Germany are interested in greatly, but this is a time when the countries of Europe should be growing closer, not splitting up after 300 years together. Breaking the union would be such a final, irreversible event.”

He’s an Anglophile electorally, too. McAllister’s familiarity with British politics alerts him painfully to the fact that the German equivalent displays all the colour and flamboyance of a bank holiday in Bremen. He talks of watching Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK as though it were something from ancient Rome, an explosive riot of contention. “Your debate culture is so unlike ours,” he says. “We are very earnest, very measured. You listen to one German politician and you’ve heard them all. British politicians are so inspiring. We think Westminster is something very special, lively and entertaining.”

McAllister visits Scotland every two years or so, mainly to drop in on cousins in Newton Mearns, a tolerant arrangement given that he has a state to run and his cousins don’t. He has a German mother and English ceased to be spoken in his household when his father died in 1990.

He speaks in the clipped, hygenic tones of Germany’s Eurocratic professional class, though oddly enough, like Salmond, he has the habit of pronouncing “th” as “f”, as in fanks a lot. At heart, though, the language he speaks is another tongue entirely, concerned more with pan-European solidarity than with the fankles of a nation that’s antipathetic to Europe anyway.

He is pained by the Conservatives’ reluctance to embrace closer European integration. “I really don’t know why British Conservatives do it,” he says. He would also like to see other candidates to challenge Tony Blair, should he decide to run for the presidency of the EU.

“Well, the Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, is a very good candidate, too,” he says. “It would be hard for me to choose between him and Tony Blair. There are a lot of liberal-Conservative governments in Europe, so that might speak against Blair. On the other hand, he is highly respected here, especially for his position on the Iraq war.”

Back in Lower Saxony, meanwhile, it occurs to McAllister he has a mutual acquaintance he might have mentioned to Salmond. Angus Robertson, the SNP member for Moray in Holyrood, speaks fluent German and has tried to draft McAllister into fighting anti-Scottish prejudice. Germans cherish the notion, apparently, that Scots are congenitally mean; hence frequent use of the phrase “Scottish price”, most recently by the airline Lufthansa.

As one of the beneficiaries of Germany’s new attitude to ethnicity, however, McAllister is operating at an exchange rate that’s set only to increase.

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