Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

This updated edition first published in 2015

Copyright © The Chronicles of Deer 2015

Alex Salmond asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

Cover photograph © Mark Runnacles/Getty Images

Picture section credits: all photographs by Allan Milligan, except: pages 10 and 11, Tom Farmer; page 18, AFP/The Scottish Government; page 19, courtesy of Fergus Mutch; pages 20 and 21, Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images; page 22, Ian Rutherford/The Scotsman Publications Ltd; page 23, Herald Scotland; page 24, Dan Kitwood/Getty Images; page 25, PA Images; page 26, The Parliamentary Recording Unit. All rights reserved.

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Source ISBN: 9780008139780

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008139773

Version: 2015-09-08

Dedication

To my dad, who believes in independence,

and my mum, who believed in me

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART I

Prologue

Introduction

The Run-Up

The 100 Days

Epilogue: The Scotland We Seek

Acknowledgements

PART II

Election Day

Introduction

Pre-Election Diary

Post-Election Diary

Scotland”s Future In Scotland’s Hands

Picture Section

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART I

Prologue

Day 100: Friday 19 September 2014

I phone David Cameron from a backroom in Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth exhibition centre, and congratulate him on victory. He congratulates me on an amazing campaign. He tells me that he has appointed Lord Smith of Kelvin to take forward the promises made to Scotland in the dying days of the referendum – the ‘vow’. ‘Excellent choice,’ I say, and he pauses.

It suddenly occurs to me that he clearly doesn’t realise how well I know Robert Smith. Why on earth does he think I appointed him to lead the Commonwealth Games? I press Cameron on whether he will have a Commons vote on the offer to Scotland before Easter, as Gordon Brown has promised. I know he won’t.

With dawn approaching, the Prime Minister rings off to go and make his speech outside Number Ten, which I watch on TV. As he struts out to say that Scottish reform must take place ‘in tandem with’ and ‘at the same pace as’ changes in England, I immediately realise the significance. There was no mention of this last week when he was in a complete panic about the polls.

I think ‘You silly arrogant man’ and look around the room. The campaign team are totally exhausted, all passion spent, and no one realises the door that Cameron has just opened. I understand – no, I sense – what now must be done.

Just a few hours earlier, at 3.30 a.m., my wife, Moira, and I had left for Edinburgh from Aberdeen airport.

A snapper caught us at the gates. I had my head down, reading the referendum results on my iPad as they came in – far from the most flattering image of the campaign – and I saw the picture posted online before we had even reached Edinburgh. Anticipating the same thing happening at Turnhouse, I made sure I was sporting the bravest of smiles as we left the airport.

First we went to Bute House, where I phoned my Chief of Staff, Geoff Aberdein, to say that I would make the concession speech from Dynamic Earth as soon as the NO side had the official majority. The YES campaigners had been gathered there all night and would be gutted. They had to hear from me directly.

I delivered the speech that I had drafted very early in the morning when the first result from Clackmannan came through at 1.31 a.m. It was gracious in tone but resilient in defeat, celebrating the 1.6 million votes for YES and pointing to the future.

Following Cameron’s appearance outside Number 10, and now back in Bute House, I sit down and write a brief resignation speech. I know exactly what needs to be said. It takes but one draft. I ask the press team to arrange for John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon to come and see me at lunchtime, and to organise a press conference for the afternoon. Finally, Moira and I are able to catch up on an hour or so’s sleep.

When getting dressed I reach for my favourite saltire tie, but Moira says that tartan would be better – softer – for this particular day. So a Lochcarron tartan tie it is.

Nicola and John arrive. We meet in the Cabinet Room. Nicola tries to talk me out of it, and at some length. She points out that there is no demand, no expectation, of a resignation.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That is the time to do it.’

John, who was in this situation with me fourteen years ago, is emotional. Calmly, I explain that I am not resigning out of pique or even disappointment. I am heartbroken about the result, but that is not the issue now. Cameron has opened the door and we must drive through it quickly. This is about what best takes the country forward.

Peter Housden, my Permanent Secretary, arrives. Calm and authoritative as ever, he puts the arrangements into gear. He agrees that, despite the shortage of space, Bute House is the appropriate, indeed the only, place to deliver this speech. The drawing room is packed by 3 p.m. I thank people for coming at short notice and deliver the following address:

I am immensely proud of the campaign which YES Scotland fought and particularly of the 1.6 million voters who rallied to that cause.

I am also proud of the 85 per cent turnout in the referendum and the remarkable response of all of the people of Scotland who participated in this great democratic constitutional debate, and of course the manner in which they conducted themselves.

We now have the opportunity to hold Westminster’s feet to the fire on the ‘vow’ that they have made to devolve further meaningful power to Scotland. This places Scotland in a very strong position.

I spoke to the Prime Minister today and, although he reiterated his intention to proceed as he has now outlined, he would not commit to a second reading vote by 27th March on a new Scotland Bill. That was a clear promise laid out by Gordon Brown during the campaign. The Prime Minister says such a vote would be meaningless. I suspect he can’t guarantee the support of his party and, as we have already seen in the last hour, the common front between Labour and Tory, Tory and Labour is starting to break.

But the real point is this. The real guardians of progress are no longer politicians at Westminster, or even at Holyrood, but the energised activism of tens of thousands of people who I predict will refuse to meekly go back into the political shadows.

For me right now, therefore, there is a decision as to who is best placed to lead this process forward.

I believe that this is a new exciting situation that’s redolent with possibility. But in that situation I think that party, parliament and country would benefit from new leadership.

Therefore I have told the national secretary of the Scottish National Party that I shall not accept nomination for leader at the annual conference in Perth on 13th–15th November.

After the membership ballot I will stand down as First Minister to allow the new leader to be elected by due parliamentary process.

Until then I will continue to serve as First Minister. After that I shall continue as member for the Scottish Parliament for Aberdeenshire East.

It has been the privilege of my life to serve as First Minister. But as I said often enough during this referendum campaign, this is a process which is not about me or the SNP or any political party. It’s much, much more important than that.

The position is this. We lost the referendum vote but Scotland can still carry the political initiative. Scotland can still emerge as the real winner.

For me as leader my time is nearly over. But for Scotland the campaign continues and the dream shall never die.

Introduction

I have believed in Scottish independence all of my adult life.

The roots of this are not, as is often assumed, because of my background as an economist, although that undoubtedly helped. It runs much deeper than that.

In fact it was another Alex Salmond – my grandfather – who first sparked this Alex Salmond’s belief in Scotland. This faith was instilled in me on my grandfather’s knee when I was barely more than a toddler.

My wise granda – Sandy to everyone – had a town plumber’s business in Linlithgow. He was in his late sixties and retired when I was young but kept his hand in by taking on odd plumbing jobs. I was his young apprentice, proudly carrying his tools.

As we trudged round the wynds and closes of the royal and ancient burgh my granda filled me with Lithgae folklore and Scottish history and how the two intertwined. He told me, for example, how King Robert Bruce’s men captured Linlithgow castle by the simple expedient of blocking the portcullis with a hay cart.

More than that, he named the families involved: local folk in the town, families that I knew – the Binnies, the Davidsons, the Grants, the Bamberrys, the Salmonds and the Oliphants. Oliphants were the local bakers. In my child’s eye I imagined the boys in the bakehouse making the bread, dusting off the flour and then charging off to storm the palace.

I was taught no Scottish history at school, but years later at St Andrews University I finally learned the history of my own country and discovered that my granda’s oral tradition wasn’t too wide of the mark – if we forgive his artistic licence in the naming of names. Of course my grandfather wasn’t really teaching me history but about life: how ordinary people could make a difference.

To my grandfather an honest man was the noblest work of God, Scotland was a special place on earth and Linlithgow was a very special place in Scotland. With this grounding it never even occurred to me that there was anything that could not be achieved with sufficient commitment and determination.

Robert Burns once wrote that a similar experience in boyhood gave him a Scottish view of the world which ‘will boil alang there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest’.

So it shall be with me.

Everything else I have been taught or experienced, from the science of economics to the art of politics, is overlaid on these foundations: the belief that Scotland is a singular place and that the people of Scotland are capable of great things.

*

It was the best of times. It was the best of times.

For many people the Scottish referendum campaign was the best time of their lives, a far too brief period when suddenly everything seemed possible and the opportunity beckoned for the ‘sma folk’ to make a big impact.

We didn’t win the vote but we did show the establishment circus – and its ringmasters Cameron, Miliband and Clegg – that major change is inevitable. The accepted order has been smashed – and it is the people who have achieved it.

There is a scene in the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven which sums up where we are now. Orlando Bloom, as the knight Balian, is left defending Jerusalem from the Sultan Saladin with no knights and only the dregs of the army. He has a brainwave: unite the remaining people by making them all knights, much to the disgust of the cowardly Jerusalem patriarch who wants to surrender.

‘Do you think that merely by making people knights they will fight better?’ asks the patriarch.

‘Yes,’ replies Balian.

And he was right. Trusting the common people with the future of their city, or their country, makes for better people and in our case for a better Scotland. Those metropolitan commentators puzzled by the surge in the SNP’s fortunes since the referendum should understand this reality.

Once people have had a taste of power they are unlikely to give it up easily. The process of the referendum has changed the country. Many people felt politically significant for the first time in their lives. It has made them different people, better people.

This book seeks to explain that change, how we got here, why the people became enthused, what caused the big swing to YES, how success was just denied and, most crucially of all, what will happen now.

The events in Scotland underline the ability of grassroots movements to take on political establishments in modern democracies. A new and powerful force has been mustered – modern-day knights if you will. And the international community should sit up and pay attention.

*

But now to our referendum tale. Ours is but a new chapter – albeit a crucial one – in a much older story. Scotland is one of Europe’s oldest nations.

In the late twelfth century, when Balian was busy defending the Holy City, Scotland had already been united as a kingdom for 300 years, with Picts and Scots forced together under the threat of Viking incursions. Richard Coeur de Lion never did manage to win back Jerusalem, but his crusade gave William the Lion of Scotland an excellent opportunity to be released from the feudal impositions Henry II had enforced upon him and therefore Scotland. He was able to fly his Royal Standard (the Lion Rampant) with additional pride.

The next affirmation of Scottish independence was somewhat bloodier but the outcome was the same. Robert de Brus did not seal Scottish independence by the storming of Linlithgow castle in 1313, or on the field of Bannockburn in the following year on midsummer’s day, or even in the Arbroath Declaration of six years later, but at the Treaty of Northampton with England in 1328. However, Bannockburn was still one of history’s decisive battles. It both preserved and shaped the nation.

The recognition of Scottish independence at Northampton did not finish the matter, and an uneasy relationship between Scotland and England was the norm for the next 300 years – border warfare tempered by the occasional dynastic nuptial. From a Scottish perspective, for many years, union with the auld ally of France looked more likely than union with the auld enemy of England.

And when crown unity did come in 1603 it was through a Scottish king, James VI, becoming King of England. But Scotland remained an independent nation and it would be another century before the Union of the Parliaments.

When that happened, in 1707, Scotland had a collective history of statehood, stretching back for the best part of a millennium: three times the period that has elapsed since.

Scottish dissatisfaction with the government in London has ebbed and flowed since the Treaty of Union. There have been periods when support for the union was in the ascendancy. However, it is also true that every movement for radical change in Scotland, from Jacobite to Jacobin, from crofting Liberals to the early Labour movement, was overlaid with Scottish nationalism.

Even those famous Scots who are often regarded as pillars of the established order have displayed a sneaking sympathy for the nationalist cause. On the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament are inscribed the words that Walter Scott put into the mouth of Mrs Howden in Heart of Midlothian:

‘When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.’

The immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a high point of Britishness, which had a bearing on my own upbringing. My late mother, Mary, patriotic Scot though she was, would probably never have countenanced Scottish independence if her son had not become inveigled into the national movement. She was from a middle-class background and her views had been bolstered by the war: the Churchill pride.

My father, Robert, however, thinks rather differently. When I was a young MP, and didn’t know better, I got into a spot of family bother. I made public the contrast between my mother’s and father’s views, revealing the capital punishment remedy my dad said was appropriate for Churchill’s treatment of the miners.

‘Salmond’s father wanted to hang Churchill’ screamed the newspaper headline. I phoned Dad to apologise.

‘Did I teach you naethin?’ said Faither reprovingly. ‘Hingin was owr guid for thon man!’

The skilled working class like my father – from Robert Burns to the 1820 martyrs, and from Keir Hardie to the early trade union movement – have always been open to the great call of home rule.

James Maxton, the Clydesider MP, speaking in Glasgow in the 1920s in support of a Home Rule Bill (and for a Scottish socialist commonwealth), declared that ‘with Scottish brains and courage … we could do more in five years in a Scottish Parliament than would be produced by twenty-five or thirty years’ heart-breaking working in the British House of Commons.’

So it wasn’t a great leap of faith for my dad to move politically from Labour to SNP in the 1960s. Nor was it for the many others who followed suit in the 1970s, forcing the issue of devolution onto the UK agenda.

The failed referendum of 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher seemed at first to have reversed the trend, but in reality it accelerated the underlying shift towards home rule.

A great deal of Scottish identity has been preserved for 300 years through the strength of institutions – Scottish churches, Scots law, Scottish education – and now the myriad of third-sector pressure groups that interact with that institutional identity.

Ironically, Margaret Thatcher’s brand of Conservatism set about dismantling many of the key symbols of Britishness. So British Airways became BA, British Petroleum became BP, and British Rail became lots of things.

But Thatcher inadvertently managed rather more than that. A quarter of a century ago she swept into the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and, in an infamous address, exposed the crass materialism of her creed. This was too much for the elders and brethren – and far too much for a Churchill Tory like my mother, who never voted Conservative again.

Margaret Thatcher had combined her visit to the General Assembly with an equally ill-fated visit to the Scottish Cup final, where she managed to unite Dundee United and Celtic fans in an ingenious and very effective joint red card protest.

Shortly thereafter, on 16 June 1988, Hansard records a brash young SNP member from Aberdeenshire, fresh from being restored to the House after expulsion for intervening in the Budget in protest against the poll tax, taunting the Prime Minister about what he described as her ‘epistle to the Caledonians’:

Will the Prime Minister demonstrate her extensive knowledge of Scottish affairs by reminding the House of the names of the Moderator of the General Assembly, which she addressed, and the captain of Celtic, to whom she presented the cup?

Margaret Thatcher had given Scottish nationalism a new political dynamic and accelerated the long-term decline of the Conservative Party in Scotland, where it now commands a mere one-third of its popular support of the 1950s.

Other factors were undercutting support for the union. The Scottish economy had been underperforming the UK average for much of the twentieth century. The reasons were deep and complex but one key factor was the export of human capital. Often it was the best people, the people with get up and go, who got up and went.

When I was a lad, thanks to my grandfather’s grounding, I knew that Scots had invented lots of things. He proudly showed me the plaque to David Waldie, born in Linlithgow and pioneer of chloroform, on the wall of the Four Marys pub. He told me that he had worked on the discovery with James Simpson of nearby Bathgate.

I soon discovered that, even beyond Linlithgow and Bathgate, Scotland seemed to have invented just about everything worth inventing – television, telephone, tarmacadam, teleprompter, etc. – and they are just a few examples beginning with the letter ‘t’!

It took me some time further to realise that Scotland’s creative grandeur is not just down to natural ingenuity but springs from our most important invention of all: long before the Treaty of Union, Scotland legislated for compulsory universal elementary education at parish level. Indeed if we look at the list of great Scottish inventors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries almost all of them were people of humble origins, because almost all people had received an education. Few flowers in Scotland were born to blush unseen.

In no other society on earth, with the possible exception of Prussia, which embarked on this mission two centuries after Scotland, would such ‘lads of pairts’ have had the educational grounding to advance in business, science and medicine.

From the most developed education system in the world sprang the Scottish Enlightenment and out of the Enlightenment came the scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs who established Scotland as the pre-eminent industrial economy of the world by the end of the nineteenth century.

For most of the last hundred years Scotland was still producing the scientists and innovators but, by and large, they weren’t staying in the country. Scotland started to export its human capital to a ruinous degree.

However, towards the end of the twentieth century things started to change.

In the 1980s, when I was working as an economist, I used to do a party trick during lectures by asking the class to write down the six top industrialists or business people in the country. The names provided were invariably a familiar litany of minor aristocrats, most of whom were running their companies less well than their fathers or grandfathers.

But by the end of the century there had been a significant shift. The most highly regarded business people in the country were no longer those who turned silver spoons into base metal but working-class Scots who had either built their own businesses or run companies on their own merits.

Thus the likes of Brian Souter, Jim McColl, Tom Hunter, Tom Farmer, Martin Gilbert, Roy McGregor and David Murray became the best-known entrepreneurs in the land. What’s more, these people were popular and were often deeply influenced by the philosophy and philanthropy of another great Scot, Andrew Carnegie.

They were also generally sympathetic to either independence or at least home rule, and none of them rated the traditional unionist business organisations like the CBI. This directly affected Scottish politics.

In the 1979 referendum people in Scotland still listened to the CBI. By 1997 they were ignoring them. By 2014 they were laughing at them.

At the same time Scotland’s economic performance improved. The country now has lower unemployment and, even more crucially, higher employment than the UK average. Indeed outside the south-east of England, Scotland now has the best-performing economy in the country.

Furthermore the second half of the century brought a revival in the arts in Scotland, which gathered pace through the millennium. From crime novels to Turner prizes to chart-topping groups, Scottish art forms flourished as the country moved through the self-government gear box. The balance of opinion in this burgeoning artistic community also favoured radical change or independence.

Against that background the movement towards home rule was irresistible. I committed the SNP to campaign with Labour to secure a double YES vote in the referendum of September 1997. The political price that the late Donald Dewar agreed to pay for securing a united campaign was his explicit agreement that Scotland could progress to independence if the people so willed. Labour, it should be said, made that offer confident that the introduction of proportional representation for the Scottish Parliament would be an insurance policy against any such eventuality.

After a successful referendum campaign, the Scottish Parliament was, in the words from the chair of its most experienced member, Winnie Ewing, ‘hereby reconvened’ in 1999. The ‘recess’ had lasted a mere 292 years!

In the elections of that year the SNP gained more parliamentarians in a single day than in the previous seventy-year history of the party, became the official opposition, and shifted the centre of gravity of Scottish politics irreversibly from Westminster to Scotland.

After a setback in 2003, the SNP, under its new and combined leadership team of Nicola Sturgeon and me, narrowly won the election of 2007, and in the process inflicted on the Labour Party its first defeat in a major Scottish election since 1955.

There followed four years of minority government with a plurality of one seat. This government was to face the challenge of the greatest squeeze on public spending since the Second World War.

However, thanks to the parliamentary skill of the business convener Bruce Crawford and the magician-type qualities of the Finance Secretary John Swinney, the minority government survived to prosper. In 2011 the SNP achieved what had, until then, been thought impossible: an absolute majority in a proportional system specifically designed to prevent that from happening.

This made a referendum on independence, a key manifesto pledge of the SNP, inevitable. In the first term of office the three unionist parties had held the line against the referendum apart from a brief period in 2008 when Wendy Alexander, as Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, had unexpectedly proposed a referendum herself.

Unfortunately for Wendy, among those most surprised by this development was Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the drama thus ended with her resignation. This was ostensibly for a minor infraction of donation declarations but in reality it was because of a complete removal of her political credibility by a London leadership team, which included her own brother Douglas, who gave her no support whatsoever.

This episode was a classic example of Labour in Scotland being treated as a London ‘branch office’, in the phrase of Johann Lamont (two Labour leaders after Wendy) in her spectacular resignation eruption of October 2014.

If the election result made a referendum certain, it did not define how exactly such a referendum should be structured. That was to be the subject of delicate negotiation between Downing Street and the Scottish government.

I had previously proposed to David Cameron, after his own election in 2010, that he should spring a political surprise and implement radical devolution for Scotland, often described in the shorthand title of ‘devo max’. This initiative got short shrift from the Prime Minister.

Why this was the case I cannot be certain. It would have been popular with his Liberal allies and allowed Cameron to propose a statesmanlike solution to the West Lothian question,* and one effectively on his own terms.

The best explanation for Tory intransigence lies in the bowels of Westminster history and deep in the entrails of the Conservative interest. From Dublin to Delhi, Westminster governments have a dreadful record of conceding much too little and much too late to restless nations. In the case of Scotland the Tory attitude is further complicated by a proprietorial instinct. Regardless of their near total wipeout in Scottish democratic politics they regard our country as part of their demesne.

David Cameron stands in a long line of Tory prime ministers close to landed interests in Scotland. The Prime Minister’s holiday retreat, the Tarbert Estate on the island of Jura, is popularly believed to be owned by Mr Cameron’s stepfather-in-law, William Astor. In fact, it is owned by Ginge Manor Estates Ltd, a company registered in the Bahamas. The name tells the family story – Ginge Manor is William Astor’s stately home in Oxfordshire.

This interest extends to the very top of the civil service. Many people were perplexed by the apparent willingness of the Head of the Treasury, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, to abandon any vestige of civil service impartiality during the referendum campaign. Some people assume that he was forced into it by a scheming and highly political Chancellor. I doubt that.

Just after the election of 2011, I had a meeting with George Osborne and Sir Nicholas in the Treasury. Normally at these sorts of meetings there is an element of political sparring between the politicians while the civil servants stay suitably inscrutable. This meeting was different. Osborne was full of bonhomie while Macpherson radiated hostility.

I have no means of looking into the soul of the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury but my guess is that a background reason for his intense level of politicisation may well lie in his family’s extensive land interests in Scotland.

Whether that is his motivation or not, there is now no doubting his politicisation. In an unwise series of admissions to the inaugural meeting of the Strand Group* on 19 January 2015 Macpherson wallowed in his new-found role as a politician. He defended his decision publicly to oppose independence for Scotland. He said that in such an ‘extreme’ case as the referendum, in which ‘people are seeking to destroy the fabric of the state’ and to ‘impugn its territorial integrity’, the normal rules of civil service impartiality did not apply.

It is interesting to speculate how far Macpherson’s rant could change the relationship between civil servants and politicians if others succumb to this pernicious nonsense. In the past his logic could have led officials to take action against any politician or indeed government ‘destroying the fabric of the state’ by, say, accession to the European Union, or ‘impugning’ its financial integrity by, say, attempting to join the Euro. In the future being ‘extreme’ in Macpherson’s judgement could be, say, advocating the non-renewal of the Trident submarine fleet.

The solution to Macpherson’s dilemma is obvious. He shouldn’t wait for his inevitable seat in the House of Lords. He clearly needs to take his own manifesto to the people directly, by standing for election in the west coast of Scotland, perhaps in Plockton, Wester Ross, near his family estate. His father (a splendid chap by every local account) can give him bed and board while he campaigns to his heart’s content, explaining to the natives what is good for us. At any rate Sir Nicholas should give up now the pretence of being a civil servant.

Macpherson was allowed to get away with it by a subservient House of Commons, united across the parties in their mutual loathing of Scottish independence. Only the independent-minded veteran Labour MP Paul Flynn saw and challenged this behaviour, recognising, for example, the dangerous precedent created by the extraordinary publishing of Macpherson’s ‘advice’ to the Chancellor on sterling. Unfortunately, real Members of Parliament like Flynn are in short supply now in the Palace of Westminster.

In any case, and for whatever reason, Cameron rejected out of hand the idea of a démarche on devo max in 2010.

After the SNP landslide in the Scottish elections of 2011, I made another attempt to revive the devo max argument by means of a third question on the ballot paper, creating a choice between independence, radical devolution and the status quo. Three-way constitutional referendums are not unknown. Indeed the Cabinet Office itself organised one in Newfoundland in 1948.

This has been interpreted by some commentators and many opponents as indicating a lack of enthusiasm for independence on my part. How little do these people know me or my background.

I believe in Scottish independence. My mandate was to hold a referendum with independence on the ballot paper. I have always thought that it is possible to win such a vote. However, as I remarked to the Welsh politician Dafydd Wigley during the referendum campaign, a punter who places an each-way bet still wants his horse to win the race.

Cameron was having none of the three-way referendum. Buoyed by private polling and political advice which indicated a potential YES vote at around a maximum of 30 per cent, he was intent on a shoot-out between YES and NO with no intervening option. Given what was to transpire in the campaign with the last-minute ‘vow’ to Scotland of ‘home rule’, ‘devo to the max’ or ‘near federalism’, there is a certain irony in recalling his hard line of 2011/12.

Cameron’s position was entirely consistent with the traditional Tory attitude in conceding the absolute minimum to Scotland. At the same time, the new Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, fought an internal leadership election arguing that there should be a ‘line in the sand’ against any further devolution proposals.

An agreement with Westminster was necessary to put the referendum beyond legal challenge and, more than that, to have the aftermath of the ballot navigated in a positive manner. The central difficulty that Scottish nationalism has faced throughout its democratic history has not been persuading people that it should happen, but that it could happen.

Therefore, Cameron made his red line in negotiations the requirement for a single question in the belief that NO would score a comfortable victory. My key objective was to secure an agreement which established independence as a consented process after which it could not – and never again – be argued that there is no means by which Scotland can achieve independence.

In contrast to that absolute strategic objective the tactical consideration of having devo max on the ballot paper was very much of secondary importance. There has been some debate as to whether this was a real position of mine or merely a negotiating posture. The truth is it was both.

Initially, in the aftermath of the 2011 election, I had hoped that we could gain substantial traction across the range of civic organisations who favoured devo max. Many of these were grouped around the Devo Plus campaign led by the economically liberal financier Ben Thomson, but there were others active in much of the third sector and the Scottish Trade Union Congress. It was clearly not credible for the SNP government to simultaneously bring forward into a referendum campaign two propositions: independence and devo max. The latter would have had to be the result of genuine work by a substantial body of opinion outside of government and also be radically different from the insipid offering of the unionist parties at the time.

However, a fully fledged proposition for devo max proved not to be possible, and in 2012 I had to come to terms with that reality. I led a Scottish Cabinet discussion on the issue.

On the whole, at least in my second period as SNP leader, since 2004, I have had little difficulty in securing consensus behind my strategy for progress towards independence. It was not always like that. In the days when the SNP were far distant from the independence objective, occasional outbreaks of ideological purity were often a comfortable substitute for progress.

In the 1990s acres of newsprint and many SNP Conference motions were devoted to attempting to interpret every single nuance of my attitude to supporting devolution as a staging post on the way to independence. Eventually I put the matter to the decision of the SNP National Council and successfully committed the party to campaigning YES/YES in the two-question referendum of 1997.

As the Party became increasingly capable of winning, then confidence grew in the likely success of my gradualist strategy. Despite this, by early 2012 I was perplexing some of my colleagues with my continuing support for a third question on the ballot paper. Even Michael Russell, the Education Secretary, who was the joint architect of my step-by-step approach towards independence, contributed powerfully to the discussion, suggesting that it was time to embrace a YES/NO referendum. After I heard them out around the Cabinet table I sprang a surprise by saying: ‘Fine, let’s do that. YES/NO it is then.’

I then confided to my colleagues that we should maintain our public pursuit of the third option, since it would put us in a strong position to negotiate the timing, the framing of the referendum question and votes for sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds – all crucial matters under the control of the Scottish Parliament. I knew that the UK government would concede much else in their anxiety to record a ‘victory’ in their red line.

In other words, my support for devo max on the ballot paper was not initially a negotiating posture, but when it eventually became one it was highly successful.

The Edinburgh Agreement between the Scottish and United Kingdom governments was duly negotiated. The most important clause, and the one that received the most entrenched opposition from the UK negotiators, was the very last one, clause thirty:

Co-operation

30. The United Kingdom and Scottish Governments are committed, through the Memorandum of Understanding between them and others, to working together on matters of mutual interest and to the principles of good communication and mutual respect. The two governments have reached this agreement in that spirit. They look forward to a referendum that is legal and fair producing a decisive and respected outcome. The two governments are committed to continue to work together constructively in the light of the outcome, whatever it is, in the best interests of the people of Scotland and of the rest of the United Kingdom.

And so when David Cameron came to St Andrew’s House on 15 October 2012 with his Secretary of State Michael Moore to conclude the Edinburgh Agreement with Nicola and me, he signed a deal which both sides believed had fulfilled their key objectives. That is, of course, the best sort of deal. They had the YES/NO choice which they believed they would win comfortably. We had a referendum legislated for by the Scottish Parliament and consented by Westminster, establishing for all time a process by which Scotland could become independent.

My remarks at the press conference were designed to move the YES campaign into ultra-positive mode:

Today’s historic signing of the Edinburgh Agreement marks the start of the campaign to fulfil that ambition [of independence]. It will be a campaign during which we will present our positive, ambitious vision for a flourishing, fairer, progressive, independent Scotland – a vision I am confident will win the argument and deliver a YES vote in autumn 2014.

The Edinburgh Agreement allowed for the referendum to be held up to the end of 2014. The proper parliamentary process meant that a year to eighteen months was the necessary preparation time, but basically this left a choice available for the referendum to take place at any point in 2014.

My decision was to go later rather than sooner. It was what I had committed myself to in the election campaign. In addition we were behind in the polls – perhaps not by as much as the Tories believed, but still well behind.

We needed the time to gear up a campaign to take us from the low 30s to over 50 per cent, a seemingly daunting task. However, we also knew from our private polling that the total potential YES support was up to 60 per cent (‘potential’ means the number of people who said they were prepared to vote for independence under certain circumstances).

But away from all the pomp and poignancy of the historic day, there were a couple of moments when I believe the Cameron mask slipped a little. Signs that suggested his absolute confidence of late 2011 was faltering and that his vaunted attachment to Scotland was based on precious little of substance.

I had asked for some private time with Cameron immediately before and after the signing of the Agreement.

Beforehand this was no more than making sure that the television shots of our entrance into my office looked natural. I confess to having arranged the room so that the all-yellow map of the 2011 Scottish election results was immediately behind my seat. I even moved in the Permanent Secretary’s table for us to sit around. In the way these things work in the civil service, it is a rather more impressive piece of furniture than the First Minister’s table! Cameron and I went in together to join our teams and I showed him my John Bellany painting which adorned the First Ministerial room in St Andrew’s House. I mentioned to him that the painting was of Macduff Harbour and pointed out that it was pretty close to where his grandfather had founded a school in Huntly.

‘Ah!’ breezed the Prime Minister. ‘I’ve never actually been there.’

Given the important business to hand, I suppressed my surprise that someone should be so rootless as to never have thought of visiting a place presumably of importance to their family origins. However, of more political significance was the conversation that took place after the Agreement had been signed and the others had left.

The Prime Minister asked me when we were intending to hold the poll. I said the autumn of 2014.

He replied: ‘But that won’t allow enough time before the …’ and then stopped himself.

I took the half-finished sentence to mean that it wouldn’t allow time to negotiate independence before the UK election of May 2015. In other words, he wasn’t so absolutely confident that he hadn’t considered the political implications of a YES vote on Westminster parliamentary arithmetic.

Westminster underrated the importance of the timing of the referendum. Everyone likes to be noticed and 2014 was set to be a huge year for Scotland when we could bask in the international spotlight.

Cameron had a blind spot on this. He believed the centenary of the Great War in 2014 would be of more significance in reminding Scots of the glory of the union.

This attitude betrayed a huge misunderstanding of the Scottish psyche. As a martial nation Scots tend to revere soldiers but oppose conflict. We have no time for politicians who believe, like Cameron, that the anniversary of the bloody carnage of the First World War should be celebrated ‘like the Diamond Jubilee’.

There were more spilled guts than shared glory in the Great War.

Cameron thus overrated the impact of war and underrated the impact of peaceful endeavour. In 2014 Scotland would host the Commonwealth Games, the Ryder Cup, even the MTV awards. It was also the Year of Homecoming.* Into this heady mix there would come a referendum on self-determination.

Once the date was set the challenge was how to create a campaign that would increase support by the 20 percentage points required to win.

One thing was certain. If we fought a conventional campaign then we would conventionally lose. It was Churchill who said of Austen Chamberlain: ‘He always played the game and he always lost.’ We had to ensure that we did not just play the game.

The forces lined up against us were formidable.

Although we had drawn up spending rules to attempt to equalise the playing field, we would be heavily outspent during the campaign. The financial imbalance was partially corrected by the serendipity of Chris and Colin Weir winning the Euromillions lottery jackpot in 2011. The Weirs, longstanding and principled nationalists and also among the nicest people in the country, could be relied upon to help redress the imbalance.

The role of Chris and Colin in facing down the unpleasant media attacks on them is worthy of the highest praise. In the looking-glass world of the old written media it is fair game to attack two ordinary Scots who invest part of their fortune in the future of their country while turning a ‘Nelson’s eye’ to those London-based big business and financial interests who bankrolled the NO campaign. If campaign donations had been restricted, as they should have been, to those on the electoral roll of Scotland, the NO side would have been struggling to finance their own taxi fares.

This old press were almost entirely lined up on the NO side. In 2007 the SNP famously won an election with both of the main tabloids vying with each other to denounce the party. But we won that election with 33 per cent of the vote. To win the referendum we required 50 per cent plus one.

The ability of the press to determine elections has declined even since 2007, but there is a difficulty when it runs against you as a solid phalanx. It determines the media agenda, which has a follow-on impact on broadcasting, a medium that does still influence votes.

The full machinery of the British state was lined up against us. The three main Westminster parties would unite to see off the challenge with their own separate agendas. Luckily, each was vying with the other in a race to be the most unpopular, and the prestige of the Westminster system was at an all-time low. The very unity of the NO campaign was a disadvantage: the image of London Labour high-fiving the London Tory Party was a massive turn-off to Labour voters in Scotland. It still is.

This left social media and grassroots campaigning as areas where we had to excel. We needed to encourage the growth of a myriad of individuals and campaign groups who would be diverse, and therefore unregimented, but would also contribute to the overall campaign. We had to let a thousand flowers bloom.

In addition, many influential and progressive organisations in Scottish society were favourable to the YES campaign and were looking increasingly to Holyrood and not Westminster for their political objectives. The third sector in Scotland was either neutral or, by majority, supportive, given the experience of seven years of SNP government, and the trade union movement was fundamentally unhappy with the NO’s Better Together campaign and was becoming increasingly sympathetic to our cause.

And so the picture, after the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement in the latter part of 2012, was not as bleak as it might have at first appeared. The key to progress was always to be on the positive side of the argument. The referendum question – Should Scotland be an independent country? – gave us that firm platform. It is simply not possible to enthuse people on a negative.

Our first key moment in the campaign was the launch of the White Paper on 26 November 2013. This 670-page document was intended to present independence as a positive but workable vision for the people of Scotland. The launch stood up pretty well to critical examination by the press, and on social media there were hopeful signs that our message was cutting through the usual fog of politics.

That night, in looking at the BBC online reaction, I was struck by an entry from Stevie Kennedy of Mow Cop, a village in Staffordshire: ‘As a Scot living in England with an English wife and kids, I feel British first. Today, though, I see a politician talking and I feel hope kindle in my heart that the UK’s future isn’t all about Westminster and the corrupt industrial–political machinery that controls it regardless of what we vote for. It’s been a long time since I felt hope or any other positive emotion when watching a politician speaking, yet I know the next 10 months will see relentless waves of cynical negativity from the No campaign.’

I have never met Mr Kennedy, but he sums up really well the position facing us going into 2014. On the plus side we were inspiring the people with a new vision. The difficulty would be sustaining it against the avalanche of ‘cynical negativity’ which he so rightly expected.

The most consistent and regular polling was carried out by YouGov, asking the same question as the one that would appear on the ballot paper.

In August 2013, according to the first YouGov poll, the NO side were 30 points ahead: 59–29. By the end of the year, after the launch of the White Paper, their lead had shrunk to 20 per cent: 52–33.

Through the spring and into the summer of 2014 the YouGov polls still recorded NO leads of between 14 and 20 per cent. However, the previous ‘don’t knows’ were generally moving to YES at around 2–1. That group of undecided voters was around 15 per cent at the end of 2013, 10 per cent in the first half of 2014 and then a mere 5 per cent by August 2014.

At first sight, the effective stability in the polls in the first half of 2014 did not look like good news for the YES campaign. However, a deeper examination tells us otherwise.

In quick succession in mid-February the unionist forces fired their biggest guns. First George Osborne, hand in glove with Danny Alexander and Ed Balls, ruled out a currency union, while José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, popped up on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show to say that it would be ‘difficult, if not impossible’ to secure the approval of member states for an independent Scotland’s accession to the European Union.

This heavy artillery, which was meant to finish the argument, misfired. The first bombardment, on the currency, looked high-handed, with former First Minister Henry McLeish and even Gordon Brown expressing open or private doubts about the tactic.

The second barrage was regarded with even more incredulity. Sir David Edward, a former judge at the European Court of Justice and a unionist to his fingertips (albeit one who is increasingly despairing of the europhobic politics of Westminster), was moved to directly counter Barroso’s bureaucratic bombast, arguing that the latter’s comparison of Scotland and Kosovo was little short of preposterous.

Neither Osborne’s ‘sermon on the pound’ nor Barroso’s lecture on Europe cut the mustard. They were meant to close out the game but did not have the desired impact. Indeed in the case of the currency the effect was, on balance, counterproductive. And when big guns are fired too early it is sometimes difficult to reload in time.

The launch of the White Paper caused the first big shift to YES. After that, for the first six months of 2014, there was effectively a standoff between the fear-mongering of the NO side and the aspiration of the YES side. As we moved into the last 100 days, the grassroots campaign took off and momentum shifted towards YES.

And so battle was joined and the referendum decided. Of course it is possible to win a battle and lose a war, just as it is possible to lose a referendum and still win the end game. In the aftermath of the ballot the losing YES side have emerged looking like winners while the winning NO side are looking like losers. The full consequences of the Scottish referendum are only just beginning to be understood.

*

Politicians can so often sound mechanical, robotic even: pre-programmed with policies and beliefs. Possessing none of the necessary emotion that makes life worth living.

I believe that the referendum was Scotland’s democratic hour, the moment of fundamental reassessment. A time when many people realised that, collectively, they could be more significant than they had ever previously believed. The moment to change, to influence. Rather than just listening to the weather forecast, the people got to decide what the weather should be.

I didn’t have to see the world differently. My upbringing had grounded me with that same belief all of my life. I have always been fortunate to have had that at my core. There are now many more people in Scotland in that position.

The great impenetrable edifices, the blocks to progress – Westminster, the Labour establishment – are still there, but they have started to crumble and the people sense it.

I have my family history to thank for my convictions. Both of my parents eventually reached the same conclusion on Scottish independence in their own separate ways. As my father tells it, his moment of conversion happened during an exchange with a Labour canvasser on the front doorstep. Faither was asked how he would be voting.

‘Labour,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Always have.’

‘That’s great,’ said the canvasser before inquiring about my mum’s voting intention.

‘No hope for her,’ said Faither. ‘She’s a Tory.’

‘Not a problem,’ said the Labour man. ‘Just as long as she doesn’t vote for those Scottish Nose Pickers!’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Faither. ‘My best pal’s in the SNP.’

‘They’re all nose pickers,’ said the canvasser.

Dad: ‘No, they’re no’!’

Canvasser: ‘Aye, they are.’

Half an hour later and they’re still at it – but, by this time, it wasn’t just my dad’s friend the canvasser was insulting. He was running down the whole of Scotland.

Finally Faither – ever thrawn – finished the fraught conversation.

‘Look, when you arrived I told you I’d vote Labour as I have done in every election. I will now vote SNP in every election. I want you to remember that this is what you have achieved tonight.’

This exchange – which probably took place during the West Lothian by-election in 1962 – bears a striking similarity to Labour’s attitude in the referendum.

It’s not just that they campaigned side by side with the Tories, it’s the fact that they were running down Scotland alongside them too, shoulder to shoulder, hand in glove.

And you don’t have to be a member of the SNP to be angry when someone is belittling your country.

My dad has voted SNP for the past fifty years on the back of that conversation. Fifty years! And the Labour Party think they’ll be able to wash their hands and, over the next few months, move on from what they’ve done.

As for my late mum, her route was rather different and more recent – and it was more about a mother’s love than a political conversion, despite her distaste for high Thatcherism.

In the 1990s, during my first term as SNP leader, I was conducting a press conference in London when it became clear that the Labour-supporting Daily Record wanted to have a pop at me by ‘exposing’ Mum as a Tory. If he can’t convince his own mother, why should people listen to him? That kind of thing.

I knew they were going to doorstep her and phoned with a warning. ‘Leave it to me,’ she said.

The Record duly turned up to quiz her on her Conservative leanings. ‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘but all in the past. I’m actually very disappointed in Mr Major and can tell you – and this is exclusive – that I will now be voting in the same direction as my husband – and my son.’ Then The Times arrived, to whom she said she was papering the bathroom and didn’t have the time to talk. Finally the Scotsman was rebuffed on the basis that she had already turned down the London Times!

Meanwhile, down in London, cut off from the turmoil and worried sick about the press persecution of my poor mother, I phoned home repeatedly for updates. Eventually my dad answered. ‘Listen, will you stop phoning, your mum hasn’t had as much fun since the Blitz!’

There you have it. That is the well from which I flowed.

*

This is my story of the last 100 days of the referendum.

By definition it is a story told from my vantage point. I know a great deal more about the YES campaign than I do about the NO campaign. It also tells the story from the point of view of the leader of the campaign.

Quite deliberately, the YES campaign was diverse and grassroots-based. I didn’t try to control all aspects of our campaign activity. To have attempted to do so would have been to nullify our greatest advantage: our ability to mobilise vast numbers of people. Rather, we tried to get our message and themes across and, by relaying them through a cast of many thousands, see them impact on the wider community.

None of that removes the responsibility that comes with leading a movement. The mistakes (and there were a few) were my responsibility and mine alone.

Would I do a few things differently with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight? Of course I would. However, my grandfather taught me not to dwell on the past but to learn from it.

Thus on the whole, and that is the only way you can judge these things, the Scottish summer of 2014 saw the most exhilarating, positive and empowering campaign ever to impact on democratic politics. It achieved a greater amount with fewer resources than any election campaign, not only that I have ever been part of, but have ever heard of. I am proud to have been a part of that experience.

It was, for me, the best of times and the best of campaigns. I hope my granda would have been proud.

* The political shorthand for the question of parity between Scottish MPs voting on English matters but English MPs not being able to vote on Scottish domestic issues. It was so called because it was most frequently raised by the indefatigable Tam Dalyell, MP for West Lothian in the 1970s, who used the examples of Blackburn in his constituency and Blackburn, Lancashire, to illustrate the point. Dalyell was well aware that the original concept was first mooted by Gladstone in the Irish home rule debates of the 1880s. The name ‘West Lothian question’ was then coined by the Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell in a response to a Dalyell speech, when he said: ‘We have finally grasped what the Honourable Member for West Lothian is getting at. Let us call it the West Lothian question.’

* The Strand Group is a forum and seminar series of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. It aims to explore how power operates at the very centre of government. The Group’s events bring together senior figures from the worlds of governance, civil service, business, journalism and academia past and present to discuss the most pertinent government and political issues of the day. The group’s establishment within the Policy Institute has been complemented by the appointment of new Visiting Professors including Sir Nicholas Macpherson. In his lecture Macpherson defended the Treasury’s role in the referendum, stating that ‘Her Majesty’s Treasury is by its nature a unionist institution. The clue is in the name.’ Given that the present monarchy is not itself a ‘unionist institution’, having been established more than a century before the Treaty of Union, we can safely assume that Professor Macpherson is not Visiting in History!

* Scotland’s Homecoming years in 2009 and 2014 were a series of special events designed to generate interest from around the world in Scotland, particularly, but not exclusively, from those of Scottish ancestry. The first of these celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, which provided a theme for many of the events, while the second coincided with the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup. Both years are judged to have been highly successful in attracting additional visitors.

The Run-Up

As the 100-day campaign approached, the scene was set and the political temperature was rising.

Thursday 5 June 2014

A game of Top Trumps with the US President. Think I may have won.

I’ve just announced the judge-led inquiry into the Edinburgh trams project. I fully expect this probe into the controversial project to lead the Scottish news.

My Chief of Staff, Geoff Aberdein, threatens to put my gas at a peep. He comes bounding into my office in the Scottish Parliament.

‘Obama’s come out for NO,’ he says.

‘What did he actually say?’ I ask.

‘He said NO,’ says Geoff.

‘Geoff, what did he say and where did he say it?’

‘Well, he was standing with Cameron at a press conference and he said that the UK was a strong ally which should be unified but it was up to the folks up in Scotland.’

‘Good,’ I reply.

‘How can it possibly be good?’ asks Geoff.

‘Three reasons – one he was standing beside Cameron. Two: Scotland likes to be talked about and three: these “folks” up here are nothing if not thrawn.’

I add: ‘So we say, one: Cameron begged for the support. Two: America had to fight for their freedom whereas we have a democratic opportunity. And three: it is indeed up to the “folks up in Scotland”.’

‘Anything else?’ says Geoff. ‘Add Yes We Can,’ I smile.

Staying in the Sofitel at Heathrow so that I can get to Normandy for the D-Day commemorations, at some unearthly hour tomorrow morning.

Dinner with John Buchanan, my security officer, and Joe Griffin, my principal private secretary. Also there is the really excellent Lorraine Kay, from my private office, who has just flown in from the USA. An English by-election sees the Tories hold from UKIP with the Lib-Dems losing their deposit. Much being made of the continuing tribulations of Nick Clegg.

Friday 6 June

Find myself on an RAF flight back from the D-Day commemorations in Normandy with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. Brings to mind a version of the balloon game and who should be pushed out of the plane first. Probably neither of them. They both have their uses.

Appropriately enough this has been, if not quite the Longest Day, then a pretty long one. I’d caught an early plane from RAF Northolt with Clegg (remarkably cheerful) and Miliband (remarkably pleasant).

It is, of course, undoubtedly the case that Nick is putting on an act for Ed’s benefit – to show how unruffled he is by the slings and arrows of outrageous by-elections. Meanwhile Ed is on his best behaviour, as there is little or nothing in his current performance to suggest that Labour will be able to govern alone.

There is no purpose in politics in offending someone, at least unnecessarily.

In turn, I am really cheerful (at least for 7 a.m.). I want to give the impression that, despite the 20-point-plus leads for NO in the referendum polling, I might just possibly have something up my sleeve.

Also there are the Welsh First Minister, Carwyn Jones, and Peter Robinson of Northern Ireland, for once and for obvious reasons, without Martin McGuinness.

We are taken across the Channel in a very comfortable BAe jet from the Royal Flight, which I would strongly recommend to all air passengers. Laughingly make a note to self: if things go well perhaps we could get one of these – Scotforce One!

I’m offered a very nice breakfast, but it’s too early for me. Anyway, I think: the food’ll be much better in France. Our flight was certainly easier than the one which the parachutists put up with on D-Day.

In virtually no time at all we are at Caen airport heading towards the prefecture where the delegates are assembled for the first of several church services.

The highlight of the first service is the consecration of a massive bell in the middle of the Bayeux cathedral. I meet my first veteran of the day, from Southport, who asks me if I am the one who is ‘causing all the trouble’. At least he says it with a twinkle in his eye.

On the walk from the cathedral to the cemetery for the second service the townspeople clap the D-Day veterans as they march forward in the sun. It is the first of a number of moving moments.

Foolishly having turned down some factor 50, and even more foolishly with no hat on, I am baked in a warm sun at the cemetery. However, the day is enlivened by some chats with the old soldiers from around the Commonwealth who are in robust form. And all of whom have brought their headgear.

I meet John Millin, son of Piper Bill, who featured in the film The Longest Day, and whose statue adorns Sword Beach. John tells me a couple of things.

First, despite sporting a set of bagpipes he is actually no piper but had promised his dad on his deathbed that a Millin would play at the unveiling of the Sword Beach statue. So he is able to play ‘Highland Laddie’, one of his father’s tunes from D-Day, and pretty well nothing else.

He also discloses the real sequence of events on D-Day. Millin did not actually volunteer for a suicidal piping recital, but when ordered by Lord Lovat to play a tune demurred, pointing to the King’s regulations aimed at stopping the demise of pipers in active combat.

‘Ah,’ breezed Lovat, ‘that’s English war office and doesn’t apply to us Scots – so just play.’ Bravely, Piper Bill followed this direct order and, with comrades falling like flies all around him, he miraculously escaped without a scratch.

The next day they asked some captured German snipers: ‘Why didn’t you shoot the piper?’

‘He was obviously a madman,’ they replied, ‘and the Wehrmacht is not in the business of shooting lunatics.’

So, not quite as represented in the film but a cracking story. Come to think of it, rather better than in the film.

Piper Bill’s role is duly celebrated in a pretty good pageant which is the centrepiece of the French commemoration at Sword Beach. Trouble is, they start an hour and a half late and have a dozen veterans lined up to meet the various heads of state, who all insist on arriving one by one.

The prospect of our heroes surviving D-Day only to be struck down by sunstroke at the commemorative pageant is too awful to contemplate. Fortunately someone has the presence of mind to get some umbrellas for shelter, although a French TV producer keeps pinching the veterans’ water bottles because she thinks they are ruining her best shots.

While we wait I take the opportunity to have a quick word with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is sitting just opposite me.

I start by suggesting that, given the President’s pronouncements, I might expel John from the Scottish caucus – the group in Congress that Senator Jim Webb has brought together to promote the Scottish interest.

He seems to think this suitably funny and tells me that we have a ‘big day’ coming up and that ‘it’ (presumably Obama’s statement) is ‘the least we could say’.

Things are just starting to get really interesting when Carwyn Jones comes up to get a photo and all revealing chat stops. Kerry’s last words to me are ‘Good luck’.

After Sword Beach we are back to Caen, where all heads of state take off in strict protocol order, Airforce One first. This means that the very pleasant Prince Albert of Monaco takes off before the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief of the General Staff and me.

We board a Hercules transport plane. The trip back is rather like the closing scene of Where Eagles Dare, with the top brass, Ed, Nick, Carwyn and me, sitting with our backs to the fuselage – and me wondering who should be jettisoned first.

Back to Northolt in double quick time before Joe and I fly on to Aberdeen. The crew are good sorts and for the final leg I am in the jump seat in the cockpit. They tell me that they did most of their flying time in Afghanistan, where the Hercules was the ideal aircraft: it has near-vertical take-off with a light load. This stops bandits being able to shoot at you – which seems like a pretty unanswerable argument.

Despite the best efforts of the crew and a very rapid flight straight up the North Sea to Aberdeen, the taxiing around the airport takes time and a dash to Inverurie mart has me arriving at 10.30 p.m. – quick enough for people to see me making the effort but not in time to address the Taste of Grampian dinner.

This is a great pity, since I had intended to open my speech with the line: ‘I apologise for my late arrival but Airforce One delayed my Hercules taking off from the D-Day landings at Caen airport!’

Saturday 7 June

A day at home preparing for the 100-day sprint to the line.

I have some time to think about Cameron’s pleas to everyone and their auntie for help against independence and about some people being daft enough to respond.

After the Obama ‘intervention’ we had been wondering who else Cameron and his crew would be successful in persuading to speak against us. We’d heard reports of the Foreign Office briefing against us and we expected that all significant leaders had been asked for their view. Galling, since we pay those people’s salaries.

But my hunch is still that it is good for YES and that is what I shall certainly suggest to Andrew Marr tomorrow.

Apparently Andrew Neil is tweeting that because I am on Marr then Nicola cannot be on the Politics Show – an illustration of the double-think that is now par for the course for the BBC. Clearly if one SNP politician is on one network programme, then we have exhausted our quota for the day.

Sunday 8 June

Use the interview on Marr to launch a further challenge to the Prime Minister to debate with me directly – First Minister to Prime Minister. He won’t, of course, but that is no reason for not issuing the challenge.

Interviewed down the line from the Marcliffe Hotel, my favourite hotel in Aberdeen. Indeed it is everyone’s favourite hotel in Aberdeen.

As it happens I helped Andrew with one of his first big stories in journalism.

Wind the clock back to 1982 and I was at the heart of the SNP 79 Goup’s* industrial campaign, and British Leyland at Bathgate was in terminal trouble. I had accumulated a great deal of material on how truck models were being systematically withdrawn from Bathgate to prepare for rundown and closure.

However, from the less than dizzy heights as assistant economist of the Royal Bank of Scotland, I was hardly in a position to release it myself. My solution was to give the story to a young Scotsman journalist – Andrew – who ran a very good three-part series based on the information.

As part of the job, Andrew came into 36 St Andrew’s Square to interview me. Behind my desk I had a framed copy of the first-day cover of a magazine called Radical Scotland, which featured a cartoon illustrating a quote from historian Tom Nairn: ‘Scotland will be free when the last Church of Scotland minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post!’

The depiction of a slightly panicky and very baldy meenister was not meant to be taken seriously.

Some six years later, when I was in Westminster, one of Andrew’s great friends, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, interviewed me and started his profile by suggesting that I was a very unusual Royal Bank economist, since behind my desk there was a copy of a Church of Scotland minister being strangled by a newspaper!

This led the local Conservative Association in Banff and Buchan to release a press statement saying that I wished to assassinate ministers of religion. The Press and Journal, delivered in those days to just about every home in my constituency, then put this nonsense on their front page.

As a newly elected member I was perhaps oversensitive about reputational issues, and a defamation action followed to bring the local Tories to heel, masterminded by my great friend and lawyer, Peter Chiene.

All of which is a reminder that stuff and nonsense in politics did not start with social media – it just makes it more immediate and more widespread.

Monday 9 June

Today is the day that the media has designated as the official launch of the 100-day campaign and so it is redolent with political opportunity. For my part I end up doing some personal polling in a golf club bar – and come away thinking we really can do this, despite the gap.

Nicola kicked it all off this morning with an all-women Cabinet and public question-and-answer session in Edinburgh. I take over in the afternoon and go back to Aberdeen to cover Sky and the BBC network.

I do the Sky piece from Nigg Bay Golf Club in Aberdeen, a municipal course with great views over Aberdeen harbour. Cheekily, someone – one of the green keepers I’m told – has hung a union flag on a fence in a vain attempt to get it into camera shot.

However, the guys in the clubhouse are very keen to see me, and after a few drinks I end up as an honorary member. It should be said that the folk in the bar are bang on a key YES demographic – mainly middle-aged, working-class men – but, even so, this crowd is a pretty easy and enthusiastic conversion to the cause.

I tell Geoff Aberdein in a phone call afterwards that, regardless of a general lack of encouragement in polls, I am confident that we have a real shot at this. The 100-day coverage also reinforces my view that as we move into the campaign period proper then the inevitable quickening of the pace will be of great benefit to YES.

Tuesday 10 June

I phone in to the YES campaign meeting tonight and find them a bit downbeat. Turns out that they’ve had access to a TNS opinion poll, which shows little or no movement to YES.

It is always a wonder to me that people in politics allow their morale to be affected by the latest opinion poll, instead of trusting their own political antennae.

It’s hard to give a pep talk down the phone, but I’m open and direct with my feelings: that we might not be there or even close, but everything is possible at this point. We’re not close to winning but we CAN win and the campaign has to believe that. Part of this confidence comes from my informal canvass in Nigg Bay Golf Club. My gut tells me that things are going pretty well.

Wednesday 11 June

Could be said that we held a Gunn to our own heads today.

Stayed in Strichen to cover the Oil and Gas UK conference in the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre. The speech goes well and I’m ready to face the cameras when I get a pretty panicky call from Geoff Aberdein to brief me on a self-inflicted wound.

For reasons (not altogether clear), my highly experienced special adviser [SPAD] Campbell Gunn decided to email the Daily Telegraph to inform them that Clare Lally, the ‘ordinary mother’ who featured in their coverage of the 100-day Better Together launch, was actually a member of Labour’s shadow cabinet and former Labour Provost of Glasgow Pat Lally’s daughter.

The first suggestion is correct, the second total nonsense. I know Clare personally. She is the mother of a quadriplegic daughter and a carers’ champion.

All of which wouldn’t have caused much of a stir in normal times, but what on earth Campbell thought he was doing emailing the Daily Telegraph is beyond my ken.

The paper is the self-appointed ringleader of a madcap old-fashioned media preoccupied in their conspiracy to discredit the YES campaign and all our works. There is therefore no point whatsoever in engaging with them or wasting time on them or explaining ourselves to them. Still less in sticking out our chin and letting them hit it.

The Telegraph, true to form, conflates Campbell’s foolish email with a story of the online abuse of Clare to concoct an attack. This is yet another episode in the claims of systematic online abuse from the YES side by so-called ‘cybernats’. In fact it is not ‘nats’, it is nuts. I deal with the TV interviews easily enough. I’m also asked about J. K. Rowling, who has given a million pounds to Better Together and has also been attacked online.

It is pretty obvious that the Clare and J. K. stories will now centre on the online abuse and there is next to nothing we can do about it. This story now has all the ingredients to take it beyond the Telegraph obsessions and into the tabloids and TV.

The connection with politics is coincidental. Internet trolls get their kicks by attacking anyone in the news about anything. In addition, the only research on the politics of this is by a Strathclyde University academic, Dr Mark Shephard, who has concluded in his interim report that the YES campaign is more of a target than a source of internet abuse.

However, the truth is that there is no high ground in this matter: any society and any subject is fair game for the pathetic clowns who get their kicks by abusing other people online behind the shield of anonymity. Most claims of the NO campaign don’t touch us: they are too exaggerated or just plain silly. This might.

I instruct Campbell to apologise at once and to make it clear that he distances himself from the online abuse of anyone at any time. Of course the ability to stop internet trolls is non-existent.

Let there be no doubt about the reasoning behind the Daily Telegraph attack. They would like nothing better than to force us off social media where we are dominating and back to a conventional campaign which we would inevitably lose.

Ironically the latest Survation poll from the Labour-supporting Daily Record confirms my hunch about the way the wind has been blowing, with 46 per cent YES and a big lead for the SNP in the party ratings for Holyrood. In my opinion it overstates YES support but does give an indication of the direction of travel.

* The SNP 79 Group was a ginger group set up after the rout in the 1979 election which argued for a declared left-of-centre programme from the SNP. One of its campaigns in 1981–82 was in support of workforce occupations of factories in the face of industrial closures. Although the 79 Group was defeated internally, many of its ideas strongly influenced the development of the SNP and many key members, including the author, went on to achieve high office.

The 100 Days

Day One: Thursday 12 June

‘Campbellgate’ duly dominates First Minister’s questions and I repel boarders as best as I can. Even for the rough old trade of politics there is something pretty unsavoury about today’s line of questioning. All of the opposition leaders know Campbell and indeed have known him for many years. They all said wonderful things about him when he collected his well-merited lifetime achievement award for journalism earlier this year. They all know that his email has been taken out of context by the Telegraph and that he had nothing whatsoever to do with online abuse. Yet here they all are lining up to present him as the devil incarnate and baying to end his career in an ignominious sacking!

Ruth Davidson even compared him to Donald Dewar’s SPAD John Rafferty, who was sacked in 1999 for allegedly making up death threats against then Labour Health Minister Susan Deacon. I have no intention whatsoever of sacking Campbell. My administration has been grounded on loyalty to colleagues. Even when they make silly mistakes. Leaders who fling people overboard can’t lead.

I call Campbell in at 5 p.m. and administer a formal written warning, only the second one for a SPAD in seven years. The first was for an unfortunate who managed to leave Cabinet papers in a pub. The rules drawn up in the aftermath of the fall of Gordon Brown’s spinner Damian McBride (resigned when caught trying to peddle made-up rumours about the private lives of Tory politicians) are poorly and loosely drafted. This seems the proportionate and fair action to take.

Day Two: Friday 13 June

Today is dominated by the highest YES poll so far – and meeting the real Inspector Rebus.

Launching the reindustrialisation strategy in Dunfermline at Greenfield Systems Ltd, a company which is a main supplier to the Falkirk bus company Alexander Dennis. It’s a pretty good document drawn up by our economics team and the SPAD Ewan Crawford, who has done an excellent job.

Ewan is the son of the late Douglas Crawford, a brilliant and mercurial SNP MP from the 1970s, and Joan Burnie, the doyenne of Scottish agony aunts. This family background may explain Ewan’s permanent hangdog demeanour. He gives the impression of being a melancholy chap in a constant state of anguish about something or other. It may be that he acts like a political sin eater – his worried looks serve to ease the anxiety of everyone else in the team.

At any rate it will be interesting to see how much this substantial document receives in terms of publicity compared with the contrived candy-floss of cyber abuse.

On the way back to Bute House I get the results of our own latest Panelbase poll which has YES up to 48 per cent – the highest in the series. I suggest to Kevin Pringle that the Sunday Herald and the Scottish Sun might be the best release points for a neck-and-neck poll. Rather like the Survation figures, I don’t think we are anything like as close as this poll suggests, but we are certainly in this game.

The artist Gerard Burns comes in with a choice of two portraits of me. I like the one he has set in Bute House, which will be auctioned for charity during the Commonwealth Games. The idea is called 14 for 14 – with 14 prominent Scots as his subjects and all proceeds going to 14 different charities. I choose CLIC Sargent, the children’s cancer charity, which arranges family support and respite and which has a wonderful base in Prestwick, Ayrshire.

Gerard painted The Rowan, the picture which dominates my office in the Scottish Parliament and which has become one of the most famous paintings in the country. I am interviewed in front of it pretty constantly.

In 1998 Gerard was a struggling young artist and schoolteacher who received the commission of his life, the chance to have one of his pictures hung in the new parliament’s temporary home in the General Assembly building on the Mound. He put his heart and soul into the work and painted a group of people carrying a huge saltire set against a Glasgow background. The picture is actually about hope and the rowan sprig in the hand of the beautiful young girl in the picture is a symbol of that hope. They are a family group travelling, perhaps to Hampden for a football match (very hopefully) or perhaps to George Square for a peace rally. Wherever they are going they are travelling hopefully.

All of this potent symbolism was too much for the powers that used to be in the Scottish Parliament, and they sent him a letter saying that they no longer required his very big saltire. Since Gerard binned the letter I cannot positively identify the culprit who believed that the artist’s national flag was too big for the national parliament. Suffice to say, I have my suspicions.

At any rate the world spun on its axis and Gerard ceased to be a struggling young schoolteacher and became one of Scotland’s most successful and most collectable artists. Meanwhile in 2007 I became First Minister and was on the Channel 4 Morning Line programme for the Ayr Gold Cup. Alan Macdonald, the owner of Ayr racecourse and a devotee of both Robert and Gerard Burns, had positioned The Rowan so that the giant saltire was reflected over the racecourse like a great rainbow. Suitably impressed, I asked about the picture and was told the rather sad story about the struggling young artist who had been so cruelly snubbed by the Parliament.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we can put that to rights as I have just moved into a new office.’ And so it came to pass that Gerard loaned the picture to the government for as long as I was First Minister: a fine and generous gesture, but not a foolish one. One day Gerard will receive back into his possession one of the most famous and sought-after paintings in the country.

I choose the Bute House portrait because the other one, based on a New York Times picture, looks a shade on the messianic side. Gerard kindly offers me the messianic one, but in office I can’t accept personal gifts. I suggest instead that he donates it to the SNP or the YES campaign, where messianic pictures are in great demand!

Later in the evening I have dinner with Ken Stott who, when portraying the detective Rebus, is a most convincing Hibernian supporter. He turns out to be a Heart of Midlothian supporter like myself – so a Jambo as well as a really interesting guy with a great grasp of politics.

‘How do you play Rebus’s Hibee football loyalties with such conviction?’ I ask.

‘It’s called acting!’ says Ken.

Day Three: Saturday 14 June

I’m hoping that the Commonwealth Games will produce some new Scots sporting greats – like my boyhood hero from the 1970 Games, Lachie Stewart. I meet Lachie and a range of other Games greats when we greet the Commonwealth baton at Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh.

I am able to tell him exactly where I was when he out-sprinted the great Oz athlete Ron Clarke and the rest of the field to win gold for Scotland. It was a Saturday and I was a ‘junior agent’ (paperboy) for the Edinburgh Evening News. Our ‘senior agent’ (my boss) came to collect the money at my pal Alan Grant’s house. However, we were all watching the 10,000-metre final and he sat down to join us.

‘Have you ever thought of absconding?’ I asked him, nodding towards the cash which lay scattered in small denominations of old money on the Grant living-room carpet.

‘You mean with someone’s wife?’ came the enigmatic reply. Senior agents were not recruited for their extensive vocabulary.

Lachie tells me that in those days you just had to fit in preparation for big meetings as and when you could, but normal life had to come first – in his case his work as a dental technician in Edinburgh. In my boyhood there was a character in the Hotspur comic called Alf Tucker, who was known as ‘the tough of the track’. Alf used to finish working on building sites, eat a quick fish supper and then demolish prima donna athletes (usually very large Germans or very flash Americans) in the big races. Lachie Stewart is the real-life ‘tough of the track’ and all the more admirable for that.

Ron Clarke, in contrast, was a professional in all but name. He said later that he didn’t even know who Lachie was as he sprinted past him. Lachie Stewart is a Scottish hero. Let’s hope for a few more in Glasgow.

The mood at the Commonwealth Stadium is great. Lots of families, lots of saltires and lots of fun.

This is the second time this week I’ve felt a real quickening of the public mood which makes me think that the improved poll position recorded in both Panelbase and Survation may be a bit nearer the mark than the much poorer ratings of System Three, MORI or YouGov. Or alternatively that the nature of the panel polls means that they may be measuring what is likely to happen among the more politically aware rather than what has already happened in the general population.

It’s a day of sport, as I then go to Fir Park, Motherwell, to watch Scotland’s women play Sweden in a World Cup match. I wanted to support the Scotland women but also thought this might be a convenient place to be when asked if I was watching the England–Italy match. Eight years ago my immediate predecessor Jack McConnell made a complete fool of himself by supporting England’s opponents at the World Cup. This has never been my inclination, although I do subscribe to a theory that an extended England run during the tournament would be a big positive for the YES campaign.

Unfortunately, I think there is very little chance at all that the English nation will be led into an overdrive of patriotic fervour. Their team has a dodgy defence and an ageing midfield. The one hope for them lies in their exciting young players, but the pool of talent of first-team, first-rate English players in one of the best leagues in the world is actually small.

The Scotland–Sweden game is great fun and, cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd of 2,000 or so, the Scottish women give a better and bigger team a real game. Ifeoma Dieke, the Scottish number 4, is a truly marvellous player – not hugely quick but a fantastic reader of the game, rather in the mould of ex-Hearts, Everton, Rangers and Scotland defender David Weir. I hope I get the chance to meet her one day – with any luck at the World Cup finals in Canada next year.

On my way to Fir Park I’d heard that the ICM poll in Scotland on Sunday has YES at 45, up three points, but, true to their normal dismal form, the well-initialled SOS is leading on the idea that families across the nation are falling out with relatives as a result of the referendum process. What utter piffle.

Most papers (around thirty titles in all in Scotland) are hostile to independence because their predominantly London-based newspaper groups judge it to be in their interests to be hostile. Or at least they consider the idea of independence to be against their interests. However, the Scotsman and its sister paper Scotland on Sunday are on a suicide mission.

Andrew Neil once ran the European newspaper on an anti-European editorial and it did not last too long. Similarly, the Scotsman could survive, indeed prosper, with any editorial line – left-wing, right-wing, Liberal, Seventh Day Adventist, if it wished.

The only thing the Scotsman cannot be is unreliable on the national question, and yet that is exactly what it is. The endgame of that approach is certain. The Scotsman will disappear from the newsstands and on to the internet before long.

Back home in Strichen I arrive in time to see the second half of a pretty average Italian side cantering to a close (but still comfortable) victory over England. As I suspected YES will have to look elsewhere for a campaign boost!

Day Four: Sunday 15 June

Today I get to do what I enjoy most in politics: talking directly to people.

Taking part in the Colin Mackay phone-in for Bauer radio allows me to break out of the political bubble. That kind of contact is one of the real joys of the campaign. There are a number of points raised about the Health Service. I will make sure that the individual cases raised are properly pursued by my private office.

The Sunday Herald and the Scottish Sun on Sunday give us a good show on the apparent tightening of the polls. However, most of the papers do a post-mortem of the week’s episode of cyber abuse as if it was a YES prerogative. Interestingly, in the entire hour of the phone-in programme nobody wants to talk about ‘cybernats’ but about the Health Service and the economy. The lesson for the campaign is to keep on our own agenda and our own medium to deliver the message. We must not allow the old press to dictate the themes of this new campaign.

Day Five: Monday 16 June

Up at the crack of dawn. Destination: Orkney Islands. We have chosen Orkney to launch Our Islands Our Future.

Derek Mackay, the Minister for Local Government, has guided negotiations between the Scottish government and the three island councils* with skill, and the launch goes extremely well. The document and the process which has preceded it is an attempt to galvanise support for independence in the islands by providing the assurance (and the reality) that the process of local decision-making should not stop at Edinburgh but be community-focused across the whole of Scotland. It is important to the independence movement that we carry support in all of Scotland.

Visited Kirkwall Grammar School as part of the trip. It’s a ‘school for the future’ and I am greatly impressed by staff and pupils.

The new schools across Scotland are going to stand the nation in good stead. Actually they are the same design – for example, Kirkwall Grammar looks to my untrained eye very similar in terms of layout to Lasswade High, in Midlothian – and all the better for that. More than 460 new schools have been built or renovated since 2007 (almost a fifth of the entire estate) compared with just 328 during the first eight years of devolution. All of this has been achieved against a huge cut in capital spending and is a triumph of organisation and ingenuity over funding availability.

Day Six: Tuesday 17 June

Worried that Vladimir Putin might cause me problems – but boosted by an Englishman calling for a YES vote.

We were still in Orkney and Donna Heddle, former SNP candidate in Orkney and wife of the council convener, had arranged a lunchtime meeting at virtually no notice – and forty people immediately turn up. A chap, originally from Nottingham, tells me how he and his wife thank their lucky stars every morning for being in Orkney. He is a firm YES supporter but would just like to hear more people with his accent speaking up for the cause.

He is absolutely right!

This came after the first-ever Cabinet meeting convened from a school for the future. The Infant Cremation Commission report from Lord Bonomy was due out. This report follows the discovery that over many years babies’ ashes had been disposed of at Mortonhall Crematorium in Edinburgh without the knowledge of parents. I had promised the parents that I would chair the Cabinet that discussed the report. I was determined to keep my word and therefore I chaired the Cabinet over Skype from Kirkwall Grammar while my colleagues were in Edinburgh. High-tech stuff from a school for the future.

I hope to progress this sensitive issue through building on the excellent work of former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini. As in everything she does, Elish has adopted a model approach and has earned the confidence of the parents affected by Mortonhall, where this depressing lack of humanity and dereliction of duty were discovered. If we can apply her comprehensive look across all of Scotland then we might implement Bonomy’s recommendations and secure the information, explanation and apology that the parents are due for their own treatment at the hands of officialdom.

This would avoid the long process of a public inquiry which can seldom, if ever, provide a satisfactory explanation for individuals as opposed to key investigations of policy. What public inquiries do provide, however, is a dripping roast for less than scrupulous legal companies.

Now to Putin. Flew back to Edinburgh to hold a meeting with the Ukrainian Community. I’m expecting a difficult discussion, since some had taken severe umbrage at an interview which I had conducted with Alistair Campbell for GQ earlier in the year.

In it Campbell had trapped me into saying what I ‘admired’ about Vladimir Putin. In fact I had been rather judicious in what I said, but that is not how it was reported. At any rate I needn’t have worried. The meeting goes well and we all part firm friends.

Day Seven: Wednesday 18 June

I was only here for the beer. Not drinking it but spreading the word about the exceptional entrepreneurship of a couple of lads from Fraserburgh, James Watt and Martin Dickie, who employ hundreds of people producing and selling great real beers with their firm BrewDog.

They’re giving a presentation at the Scottish Economic Forum and I find out that they have a bar in São Paulo, Brazil.

This is a great way to kick off the forum. Firstly I say it is nice to know that Scotland will be represented at the World Cup in some capacity, and secondly that it is reassuring to know that supporters of every nation – none in particular, mind – will be able to drown their sorrows in excellent beer now brewed in Ellon, Aberdeenshire!

I also raised a laugh by describing my recent visit to the Coca-Cola factory in East Kilbride which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. One of that plant’s many achievements is to take charge of most of the commemorative bottles that Coca-Cola produce for the World Cup and the Olympic Games. Thanks to Coca-Cola executive Jim Fox they even produced one for Scotland’s Homecoming in 2009, when Robert Burns became the first person in world history to feature on the famous bottle.

In the presence of the company’s top executives I was taken around the impressive plant in a golf buggy by one of the workers, John McCafferty.

As we passed the World Cup bottle line, McCafferty said: ‘As you will know, we in East Kilbride produce the commemorative bottles. You will also know that Scotland, as a nation, decided NOT to participate in this year’s World Cup in Brazil. However, such is our generosity of spirit here in East Kilbride that we still produce the bottles for the rest of the planet.’

One of the Coca-Cola top guys turned to me and asked: ‘Is that right? You guys decided not to go? Was it a protest?’

‘Let’s call it East Kilbride irony,’ I replied.

Day Eight: Thursday 19 June

Everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist about the cost of setting up the governmental structures of an independent Scotland.

Professor Patrick Dunleavy, of the London School of Economics, has been at loggerheads with the Treasury over the past few days after they claimed that it would take £2.7 billion and attributed that figure to his research.

Patrick is not a man to be trifled with or to have his work traduced. He immediately blogged that their figures were ‘bizarrely inaccurate’ and ‘badly misrepresented’ his key data. He accused them of being out by a factor of twelve. The Treasury Permanent Secretary has even admitted to ‘misbriefing’.

Tory leader Ruth Davidson and the Lib Dems’ Willie Rennie pursue me at First Minister’s Questions on these set-up costs. Their joint attack badly misfires when I announce that I have already held a meeting with Professor Dunleavy to discuss his work in detail.

This shouldn’t really have been too much of a surprise to them, since I had mentioned the possibility two weeks previously – at First Minister’s Questions.

Seems like the best way to keep a secret around here is to mention it at FMQs!

Then to Edinburgh’s New Club at the behest of the hugely likeable and totally inveterate right-winger Peter de Vink, who has invited me to address the free-market dining group the Tuesday Club – on a Thursday. Peter is totally convinced that, with enough exposure, I can recruit other free-marketeers to support freedom for their country.

It is an occasion to remember, but not so much for my success in recruiting free-marketeers. Rather a young American singer called Morgan Carberry sings ‘Caledonia’ with Edinburgh Castle as a backdrop through the window of the New Club dining room. ‘Caledonia’ always makes me cry, but Morgan’s story would bring a tear to a glass eye.

She had come to Scotland on a Marshall Scholarship, part of the post-graduation study programme introduced by former First Minister Henry McLeish. She is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire but now is to be flung out of the country because her personal relationship broke up within days of her qualifying for permanent residence. It is difficult to fathom how anyone could conceive that depriving the country of this intelligent and talented young woman could benefit anyone. It is, of course, exactly why we need our own immigration policy for our own country.

Day Nine: Friday 20 June

Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, is just about the only public official in London who is playing things with a straight bat.

I have a private phone conversation with him in the middle of a visit to an excellent youth diversionary behaviour project – before heading to the Youth Cabinet.

Mark is a straight down the line sort of guy. I suggest to him that the polls will tighten and that one way to prevent instability in the financial sector is for him to make a ‘Whatever happens, I’m in charge’ type of statement. That would just reflect reality. Whatever the result, the Bank will have that responsibility at least for the next two years. He promises to think about it and I believe he will.

The Youth Cabinet is in the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow and my speech and presentation are starting to catch alight, reflecting the political fires which I think are beginning to burn.

A remark by the late Donnie Stewart, MP for the Western Isles, perhaps reflects best where we are now. He described the political heather as ‘not burning but smouldering’.

The golfers in Aberdeen, the families at Meadowbank, these youngsters in Glasgow. The heather is not yet burning but it is starting to smoulder.

Donnie Stewart once found himself, rather unexpectedly, the leader of a band of eleven MPs in a crucial position in the close-run parliament after the October 1974 election. A Times journalist was dispatched to interview this hick from the sticks and was clearly not pleased to have been given the lowly task.

In his most patronising tone he asked Donnie: ‘And so, Mr Stewart, your outfit seriously believes in independence for Scotland?’

‘Nope,’ says Donnie, puffing on his pipe.

‘Well, Mr Stewart, you do believe in some sort of parliament for Scotland?’

‘Nope,’ says Donnie, still puffing.

‘Ah well, Mr Stewart, you do believe in more SAY for Scotland?’

‘Nope,’ says Donnie, shaking his head.

‘Well,’ says the journalist, by now completely exasperated, ‘what on earth do you believe in, Mr Stewart?’

‘TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION,’ came the majestic put-down from the Isle of Lewis!

After the Youth Cabinet I go off to Nairn to join Moira, since we are snatching a couple of days at Castle Stuart near Inverness. I have made up my mind to try and get a minimum of three escapes to golf courses during the referendum campaign.

This is to keep myself reasonably sane and my weight under some control. I need to try and stick to my 5–2 diet.

Moira is a great sounding board for what’s really going on in the country. She has been telling me since the spring that the race is tightening. Before that she hadn’t said much at all, which I took as a cause for real anxiety.

Moira lunches with ladies in Turriff – at Celebrations, a big concern in the town, where you can buy anything. It’s like an old-fashioned emporium, although certainly not old-fashioned in style, and it acts like a magnet. People come into town for it, and that has knock-on benefits for the rest of the high street.

These ladies are a diverse group – farmers’ wives, nurses, young mums and the like – and they meet for charity fashion shows and so on. And Moira takes the temperature.

We chat about the latest soundings over dinner at the Classroom restaurant in Nairn.

I meet an American party of golfers who are in high form and high jinks having played Nairn Western. One of them tells me that he has been doing his own opinion polling as he goes around the great links courses of Scotland.

According to him everyone in St Andrews is voting NO and everyone in Nairn is voting YES.

He suggests that I should be in St Andrews!

Day Ten: Saturday 21 June

Hundreds of people turn up for the YES Scotland’s Inverness office opening. An incredible crowd given that it was arranged online in a few hours.

I cut the ribbon in the company of the wonderful Julie Fowlis – the singing voice of the Disney movie Brave – and that fine man John Duncanson, the former news anchor of Grampian Television.

Golf calls and we travel to the Castle Stuart links. I play not too badly in tying the game. Round in 88, which for me these days is pretty good. I am now within 29 shots of shooting my age.

A quick drink at Nairn Western golf course, where they were opening their own halfway house – not devo max, but a whisky oasis for those who wish to recover from (or forget entirely) the first nine holes.

On arrival, I hold a conference call to make sure that we are properly equipped to respond to Patrick Dunleavy’s report on the cost of government for the Sunday Post. The call goes well, as I suspect so will the report.

Moira treats me to the Mustard Seed in Inverness, one of her favourite restaurants.

Day Eleven: Sunday 22 June

I’m back on the links today – but it is Patrick Dunleavy who hits a hole in one and bunkers the Treasury.

His report in the Sunday Post has gone well for us and very badly for the UK government. He estimates the initial set-up costs of independence at £200 million – in a different league from the Treasury’s overblown estimates which they had claimed to be based on his research.

Earlier, in the summer sunshine of Castle Stuart, I had listened to the BBC’s new political radio programme anchored by Andrew Wilson and a Labour activist.

Former MSP Andrew is as witty and engaging a political figure as we have in the country, but this format simply will not do. It is not BBC bias this time, just incompetence. It sounds like they have given two minutes’ thought to the format and no training at all to the NO lady. I find myself thinking that it is not fair to her.

Back onto the links where I am playing even better, round in 84 (42–42) with a comprehensive 4 and 3 win. I am now within 25 strokes of shooting my age!

But well as I am playing, the Dunleavy report is playing even better. Back to Strichen on a glorious summer evening.

Day Twelve: Monday 23 June

I’m determined to get the huge tourism potential of the Borders railway line on track.

Staying at the Dryburgh Abbey Hotel because it is near the new Tweedbank Station, the terminus of the Borders railway and the focus of tomorrow’s visit.

It has been difficult to get our officials to fully understand the economic potential of tourist rail.

Given that the economics of the line are challenging, Transport Scotland have been giving themselves a mighty and, to be fair, well-merited pat on the back for keeping it on schedule for opening this coming year. Of course the main line will be crucial for economic development and in commuting terms will be a great success.

The more I study this, the more convinced I am that the new ‘Waverley Line to the Borders’ can become one of the great tourist lines in Europe. The reasoning is clear. There are already highly successful tourist lines in Scotland, such as the West Coast Line, but for most people it takes a day to get there, a day to have a wonderful experience and a day to get back.

What we need is to offer the magic of steam and to offer it, not once every third Sunday, but three times a day in the high season. John Cameron, the ‘silver fox’ – once the greatest sheep farmer in Europe, and now a steam engine enthusiast – has indicated that he could make available The Union of South Africa, one of the great and iconic engines of the age. John has told me, however, that any big steam engine will need a turning circle at the terminus.

In contrast to the West Coast Line, the journey up and down the line to the Borders will take half a day from the busiest railway station in the capital of Scotland. Five million people visit Edinburgh each year. Over 1 million go to Edinburgh Castle. Why shouldn’t at least half of that number head off to the Borders to sample the magic of that beautiful undiscovered part of our country? If the average tourist spends £200 on the retail and cultural offerings down the line then we will generate a visitor boom of £100 million for the Borders.

But I want to see Tweedbank Station for myself to establish if we can have that turning circle. I phone Councillor David Parker, leader of Borders Council, who has the rather good idea of making a permanent home for the Great Tapestry of Scotland – at Tweedbank. It could be a great boost to the Borders Railway.

The Great Tapestry – an all-Scotland community project of weaving – has been wowing the masses as it has toured around Scotland over the last year. One Thursday I arrived at Parliament where the queues were out the door and around the block. I thought they were in a line for First Minister’s Questions. In fact they were there to see the Great Tapestry.

Day Thirteen: Tuesday 24 June

Today is the day I decide to take a stronger hand in the direction of the campaign.

Kick off at the crack of dawn at Tweedbank station with David Parker. We will make his tapestry idea happen in time for an announcement before the purdah* period in August.

We have agreed to abide by purdah in the run-up to the referendum, and so has the UK government, whose record in self-denying ordinances is not a happy one. I am aware that purdah is unenforceable and that they will likely not keep to it. However, Nicola and I have judged that we are better prepared and focused than the UK government and therefore to embrace a purdah period will be more of a nuisance to them than to us.

A mixed-tenure housing development just outside Galashiels is next on the agenda. I’m pleased to see it because I think that the new railway will open up all sorts of possibilities for the Borders – and it’s really important that all of the new housing isn’t just aimed at high-salaried Edinburgh commuters but at ordinary Borders folk.

The Cabinet is held in Selkirk’s lovely Victoria Halls. If you can’t speak there then you can’t speak. The event goes well. The Borders will be the toughest area of Scotland for the YES campaign and I am determined that our dedicated band of Borders campaigners, including my wee sister Gail and my nieces Karen and Christina, will have the maximum support possible.

Then a quick visit to Spark, a challenger electricity company headquartered in Selkirk with 200 people in their facilities centre. They specialise in providing services for tenants, and the fact that they are still running into regulatory trouble for offering tenants lower bills sums up everything that is wrong with the muddle-headed regulation of the electricity markets, which presumably should be aimed at bringing bills down.

On my way through to Kilmarnock, where I am cutting the first turf at the new college, I stop off in Edinburgh to chair the campaign meeting.

The atmosphere is still downbeat, which is pretty infuriating, given that in my best estimation we are doing pretty well. Indeed we could even be doing very well. I decide to take a much stronger hand in the direction of the campaign.

The cross-party YES campaign has had a number of issues in its organisation. In 2012 I chose Blair Jenkins as Chief Executive. He in turn appointed a range of people to lead directorates. Blair, a former head of news at BBC Scotland, had fulfilled an outstanding role in heading up the Scottish government’s broadcasting commission. As lead spokesperson for YES he is performing impressively.

However, getting the disparate organisation to reflect the cohesion of a political party is proving much more problematic. Some things have worked really well, such as the launch of grassroots groups, the public meetings around the country, our social media offerings and the celebrity endorsements arranged by my former Special Adviser Jennifer Dempsie. But inevitably a cross-party YES board has found it difficult, even with great goodwill, to provide coherent strategic direction.

It is that strategic direction – the ability to take decisions on the focus of the campaign and to see them implemented – which wins elections and referendums.

I have therefore moved the decision-making to mimic SNP election organisation. Round the table, apart from Blair and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh from YES, will be Nicola, SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, my long-standing press adviser Kevin Pringle, Geoff Aberdein, Stuart Nicolson, the political strategist Stephen Noon, and SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson. These are the battle-hardened group who planned and executed the resounding SNP success in 2011.

I have decided to move the meetings to Thursdays, which make a lot more sense for the campaigning rhythm of the week, and I have asked for proper information on our intelligence from the doorstep and also online, so that the meetings can take strategic decisions based on up-to-date information.

Staying at the Racecourse hotel in Ayr. Over dinner with prominent YES campaigners Marie and Drew Macklin, I recieve the very sad news that David Taylor of UEFA has passed away.

On Saturday I intervened to help David’s family get him into the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, transferred from Turkey, where he had taken ill on holiday.

David was one of the finest administrators that Scotland has ever produced. I had dinner with him in Bute House a couple of months back and he was ready to come out for YES. A great, great loss to the campaign and to Scotland.

Day Fourteen: Wednesday 25 June

Beginning to think this is the campaign I’ve been waiting to fight all of my life. And it’s down to the public I meet around the country – including the lovely crowd today at the ground-breaking of the new Kilmarnock College.

I had agreed to do an interview in front of an audience with former BBC reporter Derek Bateman in pretty relaxed fashion – a sort of Desert Islands Discs without the discs.

But it is the depth of the questioning from the people who have turned up, their perceptions, that really impresses me. Everyone is really getting into this battle.

These are the most informed audiences I have ever spoken to. I had questions lobbed at me such as ‘See on page 26 of the White Paper …’. This is third-degree politics at an advanced level, active citizenship. Whatever happens now we will be dealing with a changed people.

Later it was time to prep for FMQs before a productive dinner with major Scottish entrepreneur (and former Labour MP Mohammad Sarwar’s brother) Mr Mohammad Pervaiz Ramzan, his sons Amaan and Nabeel, and son-in-law Rahan.

These are seriously bright, positive people and totally engaging. What a pleasant contrast with the time-servers and dimwits who occupy the CBI in Scotland, most of whom have never run a business or would even recognise an entrepreneur.

They could play a key role in the campaign and the future of the country. We go to Ondine, one of the best fish restaurants in Scotland, run by celebrity chef Roy Brett. I judge my Muslim friends could use a good feed before the onset of Ramadan.

Day Fifteen: Thursday 26 June

My chiropodist treated my toenails – and gave me some useful insights.

I’ve known Leslie Grant for a long time (he used to look after my mum’s feet too). Leslie chats with his patients and his hill-rambling pals.

Both groups are heavily underrated political communities – perhaps not right up there with taxi drivers, but in a position to have lots of conversations.

Leslie confirms what I suspected: there is movement for YES up in them thar hills, but among his corn-ravaged pensioners of Falkirk things are not looking quite so promising.

FMQs has an end-of-term atmosphere and is generally acknowledged as a good send-off for the troops.

Day Sixteen: Friday 27 June

Meet Morgan Carberry again – and invite her to sing at Edinburgh Castle for the Chinese.

The American Fulbright scholar still faces getting her marching orders from the country.

I have agreed to intervene in her case with the aptly named Home Office Minister James Brokenshire, but have suggested to her that some publicity might help her cause. Indeed it might be the only thing that could help her cause short of immediate independence and a rational immigration policy.

Since it may well be a valedictory performance, she has agreed to sing a song or two for a Chinese investment group organised around the energy giant Petrochina.

The evening goes superbly well and by the end of it memorandums of understanding for £5 billion sterling have been signed and sealed (although it is fair to say that if there is many a slip between cup and lip there is also a difference between signing an MOU and delivering hard investment). Nonetheless a very good night’s work.

Morgan, whose singing in the New Club was beautiful, but who has a big voice for a small room, is in her true element in the Great Hall of the castle and steals the show with an impromptu performance which leaves ne’er a dry ee in the house.

Day Seventeen: Saturday 28 June

A warm reaction for me today – and a cool one for Cameron.

We are both in Stirling for Armed Forces Day, a Gordon Brown notion as part of his reinforcement of Britishness campaign of a few years back. This year, the Tory government, aided and abetted by their Labour allies in Stirling Council, decide to hold it in Stirling on the same weekend as the Bannockburn celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Robert Bruce’s famous victory.

My young advisers (and some of the not so young ones) are very wary of Bannockburn, since they believe it offers the ‘wrong image’ for modern Scottish nationalism. I disagree.

You would have to have a dead soul not to be inspired by the stand taken by Bruce and his army – and foolish indeed not to see the analogies with the current political struggle.

Bruce had first tried to reach an accommodation with Edward Longshanks to become his vassal king and then, when forced into open rebellion, had avoided pitched battle knowing that, castle by castle, town by town, victory would be his and Scotland’s. However, his headstrong younger brother had created a position where the showdown took place on midsummer’s day 1314.

I had tried to reach an accommodation with Cameron, tried to move the Parliament and the country forward, power by power, competence by competence. However, my inability to get traction after the 2011 election on a devo max proposal from enough people and organisations across civic society in Scotland created the circumstances where a showdown would take place on 18 September 2014.

Like Bruce, we are engaged with a force of awesome power. Like Bruce, we are faced with a pitched battle not completely of our choosing, and like Bruce, we have to gamble to win the day.

In any event, on Armed Forces Day the UK government’s best-laid schemes gang agley. Cameron’s all too blatant attempts to play politics rebound pretty badly.

Although the military crowd reaction is not unanimously favourable towards me it is still positive: indeed warm. The reaction to Cameron is decidedly cool.

Why should it not be, since they are predominantly a crowd of working-class Scottish families on a day out and Cameron is a Tory toff on a day trip?

Meanwhile at Bannockburn, where the organisation is struggling with the surge of the great crowd which has turned up, the reaction towards me is both unanimous and hugely favourable.

Dougie McLean in concert tops the day off nicely.

Day Eighteen: Sunday 29 June

Great reception on my home turf when Moira drags me down to a local garden centre.

We just got back home in the very wee sma’ hours.

The Sunday Herald has run a very nice piece on Morgan, with a superb photograph that well depicts this vibrant and talented woman who is about to be kicked out of our country. If a picture tells a thousand words then this picture summarises what is wrong with the lunatic UK immigration policy.

To one of Moira’s favourite garden centres, White Lodge, near Turriff, where she has decided to invest more funds in her favourite hobby. It is not often that I have any time to spend on her interests, so I take it all in good part, even when we manage to drop the car keys in one of the plant carts and spend half an hour or more looking for them!

Again I am interested in the crowd reaction, which is according me rock-star status. Elvis Presley’s ancestors came from nearby Lonmay and the Commonwealth Games baton has been touring locally, but by and large Turriff is not normally known for flashmob events like today. Especially at the garden centre.

I have always been popular in my own area and particularly in Turriff. There is however a degree of evidence piling up – for example, Kilmarnock College, Armed Forces Day – where crowd reaction tells me that something is on the move.

Whatever is happening it is not being fully recorded in most polls which, after moving in our favour, have broadly stabilised. That does not make the change unreal, just unrecorded or still to come.

Day Nineteen: Monday 30 June

Back to Bute House for Royal Week. I’ve tracked down one of my old professors for help with some historical rough justice.

I’ve asked Bruce Lenman for a quick opinion on the Appin trial. There is a petition before the Parliament – from a Campbell no less – asking for a Royal pardon for James Stewart.

Devotees of Robert Louis Stevenson will recall that Alan Breck Stuart (who bore a king’s name) may or may not have shot the Red Fox at Appin. What did happen for certain in historical terms is that his stepfather James Stuart was strung up by a majority Campbell jury with a Chief of the Clan Campbell on the bench just to make sure that there was no mistake.

Cases such as this are usually turned down, for fear of opening a can of worms and setting a difficult precedent. However, I have decided to make a check or two with Frank Mulholland, the astute Lord Advocate, before we decide on this one.

It is not often in life that you get the chance to right what seems a clear historical wrong. Hence I have asked my old history prof for an informed opinion.

On the subject of history, the Scotsman seems grievously disappointed that the Bannockburn event was sold out and decided that the key story was the queues to get in.

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