With barely seven months until Scotland decides its future, the No campaign is now being forced to dance to Alex Salmond's tune. These are desperate days for those entrusted with the task of ensuring that we are not living in the last days of the union. Several opinion polls in the last month or so are all suggesting that the momentum is flowing with Yes and startled London is now fully awake to the distinct possibility that the wind is shaking the barley in another part of its fiefdom. The Financial Times has made Scotland its special project in the first month of the year and is concluding that Scotland is sufficiently economically fit and lean to at least be optimistic about its prospects as an independent country.

Moreover, Scotland's first minister has accepted an invitation to travel to London and deliver the New Statesman lecture. The editor of the magazine, Jason Cowley, said: "Alex Salmond is one of the most provocative and powerful figures in British politics. He is a formidable campaigner and communicator and is convinced that he can lead Scotland to independence."

Mr Salmond's speech will be entitled "Scotland's future in Scotland's hands" and you can be sure that it wouldn't be happening if there were still a 20-point gap in the polls. The engagement was announced with last week's toytown prime minister's questions still fresh in the mind. That was when the leader of the country desperately shuffled through his notes at the dispatch box to look for a killer quote that remained stubbornly invisible. And the leader of the opposition, still looking like the son of Ken Dodd, was about as menacing as a Space Hopper when attempting to drive home the advantage.

At Westminster, the Conservatives in the coalition government are now also becoming aware that tectonic plates are shifting beneath them. As David Cameron bobs and weaves to avoid a head-to-head debate with Mr Salmond, his ministers, comically, have been reduced to saying bad things about Scotland to Spain and Russia in a bizarre bid to lay spikes on the road for the nationalist juggernaut.

They have even, it seems, been soliciting defence contractors' support to engage in black propaganda about job losses should Scotland vote Yes. These are the actions of men who believe that the balloon is indeed about to go up, that the lights are going out, that the chips are down.

We now appear to be entering the third of four phases of the referendum campaign before the actual hustings in August. Each phase has been dictated by the Nationalists. In the first phase, their task was simply to get people to accept that a two-year campaign was not too much and that the running of the country would not be neglected. Labour leader Johann Lamont's justified criticism of this simply failed to resonate.

This was followed by the elaborate countdown to the white paper, which seemed to confer Arc of the Covenant status on this mystical document. It weighed in at more than 600 pages and the No campaign attempted to smear it as being overly heavy and grandiose.

Yet there was a sense that voters, even those who might never get round to tackling it, were impressed that their intellects were being taken seriously at a time when the No campaign seemed not to be taking them seriously enough in trying to persuade us that Scotland would resemble 1970s Albania if it voted for independence. Following publication of the white paper, the numbers began slowly to shift.

The third phase has seen the Westminster political and coffee-house set begin to sit up straight and pay attention. This has been accompanied in Scotland by the long-awaited engagement at street level with the referendum issues. Here again, the Yes campaign has got its act together far more effectively. It ought to be acknowledged, though, that the No campaign faces several social and cultural handicaps here that it is powerless to overcome. Its leaders know, as do the rest of us, that organising rallies and public meetings in the shadow of the union jack risks them being hijacked by the scarecrow element of Ulster loyalism and the British far right.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Yes campaign website searching for an open event that I could attend, preferably off the beaten track. Between the end of January and 1 March, there were more than 200 happenings, a mass engagement that touched every nook and cranny of the kingdom. Seeking a similar event to attend on the No campaign website, I could find only a handful.

I informed a friend of mine who is close to some senior members of the No team that, if this pattern were to prevail until 18 September, it would be the difference between victory and defeat for his people. Within a few days, a glut of fresh activity appeared on the No horizon, but I was not convinced. Yes are engaging with the common people of Scotland in pubs, fairgrounds and town centres all over the country. In some of those places, the No response, in the absence of organising their own event, has been to try to have them ejected under spurious anti-politicisation laws.

At the outset of the referendum campaign, assorted Better Together voices poured scorn on the "emotionalism" inherent in the Yes strategy. Scots have since been urged not to allow their hearts to rule their heads. The problem with the No campaign is that it hasn't been emotional enough. It's almost as if they themselves cannot identify any emotional or romantic appeal in the idea of maintaining a 300-year-old union, with its shared values, tragedies, triumphs and drama. At some point, it was decided to forsake this approach and focus instead on the catastrophes that would befall Scotia if she sought to govern all her own affairs.

This has been an almost ruinous error of judgment, but one that can still be remedied.

David Cameron's "sermon from Mount Olympus" on Friday was a start, though some will feel it odd that his passion for saving "the most extraordinary country in history" does not extend to debating with the man who threatens it most.