Disappointingly, we haven’t received a reply from Daily Record editor Murray Foote to our email yesterday inquiring into the provenance of “The Vow”.

However, an alert reader who wrote to him yesterday did. You can read it below.

“Thanks for your email. The sequence of events was as follows: On Sunday September 7, numerous politicians from the main No campaign parties appeared on TV political/news programmes and told the nation that they had agreed a “timetable” to deliver more devolved powers to Holyrood in the event of a No vote in the referendum. The message came across to viewers as, at best, confused and, at worst, shambolic. The following day (Monday, September 8) the Daily Record carried a front page “Record View” opinion article that was critical of this development and of the three party leaders. I include a link to that article below. [link] Over the subsequent few days it became clear that our readers were both confused by talk of a timetable and sceptical that the timetable could be taken as a guarantee of additional devolved powers for Holyrood. The Daily Record shared that scepticism. To clarify any misconception about what the unionist parties were proposing the Daily Record requested that the three leaders provide a clear, concise and signed joint promise, in their own words, that would serve as a binding guarantee to the people of Scotland that there would be further devolved powers in the event of a No vote. We believed this clarification was essential to help our readers decide whether to accept or reject the pro-union offer as they saw fit on September 18. Over the weekend of September 13/14 I received an email with the words of the agreed vow that had been ‘signed off’ by the three leaders. The offices of the three leaders then, independently of each other, emailed electronic copies of their signatures to be published along with the words. As the Daily Record stated, Gordon Brown was involved in brokering this arrangement with the three party leaders. The Vow, as you know, was then published on our front page on Tuesday, September 16. The original intention was to publish the day before but the dreadful news over that weekend of the horrific murder of David Haines took precedent. I firmly believe that The Vow is one of the key reasons why the Smith Commission is currently sitting and why more powers will undoubtedly be devolved to Holyrood. Had the three leaders not designed and jointly signed The Vow, one or all would have found it easier to renege on the promise of more devolved powers. However, the experience of Nick Clegg after he infamously broke a pledge on tuition fees will have been a salutary lesson that they dare not do so. I will not be releasing email correspondence as, to do so, would breach confidence. I trust this answers your questions. Murray Foote

Editor”

It’s quite a strange response. For a start, it’s a bit worrying that the Record’s editor doesn’t think his readers can grasp the concept of a timetable. It’s also concerning that Mr Foote believes the incoherent waffle of “The Vow” constitutes a “binding guarantee” of anything.

For a start, as Tory MP Christopher Chope pointed out in Parliament last month:

(Our emphases.)

We note with a degree of passing interest Mr Chope’s dating of The Vow at 10 September, six days before the Record published it and 3-4 days before Murray Foote says he received it. (The second “pledge” he refers to was made by David Cameron on 19 September, and so can’t be the one published in the Record on the 16th.)

This week another reader also forwarded us an email from Lib Dem MP Sir Menzies Campbell, author of the party’s own devolution proposals:

“Each of the parties that did not support Independence had their own view as to how devolution could be improved. But there was no collective ‘vow’ as such, but an agreement on the need for change.”

A vague agreement in principle on the need for some sort of unspecified change, made without the authority of Parliament, is – it should go without saying – a very long way indeed from a binding guarantee to the people of Scotland. Particularly when Mr Chope went on to tell the Commons that any further devolution to Scotland was “dependent on change being delivered in the rest of the United Kingdom”, specifically in the context of “English votes for English laws”.

The Daily Record clearly realised that very quickly, as it issued a panicky demand on a giant billboard demanding that David Cameron uphold his “binding guarantee” – a weird thing to do, since if something is both binding and a guarantee there can by definition be no possibility of NOT upholding it.

We still don’t know who actually wrote “The Vow”, nor under whose authority it was sent to the Daily Record. One would imagine that such a “truly historic” document – a binding guarantee that the newspaper clearly regarded as sufficient clarification of the precise nature of what Scots were voting No for, and as “one of the key reasons” that the Smith Commission is sitting at all – would have people clamouring for the credit. After all, the No camp won the referendum, didn’t it?

Yet nobody seems to want their name on it. MPs of all parties have disassociated themselves from it with indecent haste. The Record says it had “no involvement at any point” with its wording and refuses to say whether it instigated it.

Cynical readers could be forgiven for arriving at the conclusion that everyone involved thinks the outcome of the Smith Commission is going to leave the people of Scotland rather angry, and that they’re putting as much distance between it and themselves as possible in advance. But for the Daily Record, that’s a rather more difficult job. For good or ill, the paper and “The Vow” are bound together for eternity.