It was the most seismic political event for a generation. In the first of a two-part series, based on extensive interviews, Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the union was saved

The drinks were still flowing at the Better Together victory party at the Marriott Hotel in Glasgow in the early hours of 19 September when Alistair Darling woke from a brief kip in his room a few floors above the celebration. The former chancellor of the exchequer – who had reluctantly agreed to head the campaign to save the 307-year-old union between Scotland and England – had been informed that David Cameron was planning to shatter two years of cross-party cooperation by playing the English card.



At 5.00am, an hour before the formal declaration that the United Kingdom – and the prime minister’s job – had been saved, Darling telephoned Cameron to warn him against using the moment of victory to demand English votes for English laws at Westminster. If he did so at this sensitive moment, rather than waiting to address the matter in due time, Darling reportedly told Cameron, he would let Alex Salmond back in the front door – essentially jump-starting the campaign for another referendum.

Alistair Darling’s 5am plea to PM ignored after Scottish no vote Read more

But as Glasgow commuters made their way to work two hours later, Cameron stepped out of No 10 Downing Street to make his first statement on the referendum result – and pointedly ignored Darling’s plea. “The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question – requires a decisive answer,” the prime minister said, determined to silence any threat from the Ukip leader Nigel Farage. “All this must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland.”

The prime minister’s intervention, which had been prepared in great secrecy by Tory strategists in Downing Street, made clear just how quickly Cameron and the Tories were prepared to press their advantage over the Labour party now that Scottish independence had been averted. Leading lights in the Better Together campaign were astonished. Within minutes of Cameron’s announcement, Gordon Brown, who had done more than any other figure to save the job of his successor, telephoned the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to express his dismay. The highest civil servant in the land was warned by Brown that the pro-UK parties would pay a big price for the announcement, which he regarded as a disaster.

Cameron’s move added a sour taste to the highly emotional celebrations among supporters of the union after their decisive win in the referendum. The SNP wasted no time in crying foul, declaring that the prime minister had abandoned the last-minute pledge made by the leaders of the UK’s three main parties to deliver more powers to Scotland by appearing to make further devolution contingent on the introduction of English-only votes at Westminster.

A few days later, Downing Street declared that the prime minister had not intended to formally link the two processes. But the Liberal Democrat cabinet minister Danny Alexander, a leading Better Together strategist, said Cameron seemed to be “trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”. Alexander, who burst into tears when the referendum result was formally confirmed at around 6.00am, had made several requests to see the prime minister’s statement before it was delivered, which were curtly rejected. “What it did was just give the nationalists a whole grievance agenda from a minute after the result was declared,” Alexander recalled. “It was just dreadful.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron dismays Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling by playing the English card. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

The union had been saved after a tumultuous end to the referendum campaign, which had seen billions wiped off the share prices of Scottish companies in the wake of a YouGov poll on 7 September giving the Yes side a narrow lead. But after a clear defeat – 55.3% to 44.7% – the SNP had been thrown a lifeline within hours of the result, undermining the Labour party and highlighting a path to a second referendum.

Within weeks, the losers enjoyed a surge in party membership and soaring poll ratings, while the Labour party, once the dominant force in Scottish politics, saw its embattled leader Johann Lamont resign. A YouGov poll last weekend placed the SNP on 47%, 20 points ahead of Labour – which would mean the loss of the vast majority of the party’s 41 Scottish seats.

When the results were announced, however, the yes campaigners were distraught. The atmosphere was deflated at the Dynamic Earth geological sciences museum in Edinburgh, where they had gathered in the hope of celebrating the demise of the union. With their dreams shattered, dejected members of the SNP and other parties in the yes camp instead listened to a crestfallen Alex Salmond concede defeat at 6.15am.

In a flurry of telephone calls earlier that morning, as he travelled from his home in the north-east to Edinburgh, Salmond told his close aides that he had decided to resign. Senior SNP figures, led by his deputy Nicola Sturgeon, tried to persuade him not to do so. “It was a very, very emotional moment,” Sturgeon recalled. “I didn’t think it was necessarily the right thing to do on that day but he had made up his mind.”

The SNP appeared to be the party in disarray throughout the day, as Salmond repeatedly delayed a press conference at the first minister’s official residence at Bute House. When he finally announced his resignation at 4.00pm, declaring in an elegant speech that “the dream shall never die”, Salmond immediately eased the pressure on the SNP. “Alex took himself out of [the equation] and obviously the story became something quite different,” one SNP aide said.

An unlikely coalition of sworn enemies, who had campaigned together under the Better Together slogan of “No Thanks”, came to a juddering and messy end as the UK parties bickered over future voting rights of MPs at Westminster. “We started off perhaps with half a step in the wrong direction,” said Lord Strathclyde, the former Tory leader of the House of Lords, who warned the prime minister at a Chequers meeting of Tory MPs and peers shortly after the referendum that he needed to act with care. “If we are serious unionist politicians, we need to use the language of healing and strengthening.”

By the end of the day, as weary campaigners from both sides repaired to bed after two days without sleep, the SNP had a clear sense of direction as it rallied around Sturgeon, Salmond’s presumptive successor. There was little time for recriminations within the yes campaign: the prime minister’s intervention had allowed the SNP to turn its focus to the future. As one member of the shadow cabinet ruefully recalled, “We allowed the SNP to win the defeat.”

It was the final act of a saga that had begun more than three years earlier, a drama that had threatened the break-up of a three-centuries long union and shaken the United Kingdom to its very foundations. It is a story recalled by its main players in a series of remarkably frank conversations as one of unlikely alliances and bitter divisions, a clash of power, identity and the deepest questions of nationhood. And it began as it ended, with the decision of Scotland’s voters.

May 2011: Salmond breaks the system

As the Scottish National party’s leaders gathered at their Edinburgh headquarters on the night of 5 May 2011 to watch election results come in, they knew they were on the brink of victory. But they had no idea how momentous the result would be. By the time dawn broke the next morning, it was clear that Alex Salmond’s SNP had won the first majority government at Holyrood – an outcome the Scottish parliament’s combination of first-past-the-post constituencies and proportional regional lists had been designed to prevent. Salmond’s victory was so large, he had broken the system.

When Salmond was informed that the SNP had beaten Labour in its heartland seat of Clydebank and Milngavie, he blurted out “fuck me”, the journalist David Torrance recorded. Told later that he had an outright majority, he muttered, “That’s not possible.” By the time all the results were declared, the SNP had taken 69 out of 129 seats.

Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s director of communications, recalled the euphoria of the moment – but also how quickly the news agenda shifted. “There was obviously the huge story that the SNP had won an overall majority, but that story didn’t last very long, because it was superseded within minutes by ‘there is going to be a referendum on the future of the United Kingdom’,” Pringle recalled.

Before the 2011 election, the SNP had been very careful not to put independence at the centre of its campaign, to avoid alienating non-nationalist voters. Buoyed by increasingly positive polling, Salmond decided to carefully unfurl his hopes of staging a referendum as late as 2014 or 2015 in the final week of the campaign.

What Salmond did not know was that the Tories had already discussed staging their own referendum. Senior Tory and Downing Street sources told the Guardian that as early as 2009, while still in opposition, David Cameron and George Osborne were “seriously sold” on testing the idea that a Tory government in London could call a referendum, which they were confident of winning, in the hope of killing independence for a generation. “I remember a meeting in 2009 where Osborne said basically as long as the central-belt middle classes support us, we will always win,” one Tory source recalled. “Therefore there’s no risk in us doing it, and that turned out to be correct, as far as the final result.”

The plan was dropped because Labour, under then prime minister Gordon Brown, were implacably opposed, according to the Tory source. In 2008, Brown had very publicly crushed a proposal to agree to an early referendum put forth by the Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander, one of Brown’s long-term allies. “At that point,” the Tory source said, “Labour were very good at capturing the unionist vote, and we couldn’t be characterised as the party that wanted to put the union in danger – it would have angered our people. There was no way we could do it without the Labour party accepting it was the right thing to do. But David Cameron, really from the off, understood that this was a question which would have to be answered.”

Despite Salmond’s bullish confidence in public after his victory, he was far from confident in private. A few months after the May election, senior figures from the SNP and the Scottish government gathered at the Apex hotel in Dundee to discuss the referendum. After several hours of discussion on whether Scotland should be asked to vote on independence or the next best thing – almost total political autonomy within the UK, known as “devo max” – Salmond had a surprising proposition. “We either go for independence or devo max – I see it as an each-way bet,” he told the room. He was afraid that independence would lose, while devo max – just a few inches short of full independence – was clearly favoured in opinion polls. But Salmond wasn’t hedging his bets, Pringle said. Salmond had told him that having both independence and devo max on the ballot actually worked in favour of independence. “If you’ve got two campaigns essentially arguing the economic and financial viability of Scotland then it broadens the base, it makes that case stronger,” Pringle explained. “And then what the independence campaign has to do, instead of having to take all of that on itself, it argues on the territory of the things that you only get with independence which by and large are very popular propositions – a direct voice in Europe, the ability of get rid of nuclear weapons, the ability to have a fairer welfare system.”

I remember a meeting where Osborne said as long as the central-belt middle classes support us, we will always win

Alex Bell, Salmond’s head of policy in the Scottish government, believes Salmond wanted to keep his options open for as long as possible. Within weeks of the 2010 election, Bell added, Salmond had met Cameron and Danny Alexander – who served for barely two weeks as Scottish secretary before being whisked down to the Treasury – and come away with the idea they would support further devolution. “David Cameron comes up to Edinburgh to say hello to Alex as a gesture from the new Tories kind of thing,” Bell recalled. “Then Danny Alexander drops in in his capacity of secretary of state for Scotland and somewhere between the two meetings, the impression is given that they want to go further than the existing Scotland Act.”

Salmond remains coy about which minister gave him the nod and in what way, but soon afterwards the first minister convened a meeting to plot a devo max option at his grand official residence, the Georgian Bute House on Charlotte Square. Bell was charged with vigorously pursuing the devo max option: to see if a viable alliance of civic, business, and political leaders could be assembled to back both options at the referendum – a secret offensive that intensified sharply after the landslide victory in 2011.

Supported by Ben Thomson, an investment banker and director of the centre-right but heavily pro-devolution thinktank Reform Scotland, Bell began secret discussions with senior figures in the Scottish TUC; with Martin Sime, the influential and proactive chief executive of the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations – the umbrella organisation for the country’s charity sector; and with business leaders who might fund the campaign.

It is understood that Bell was also encouraged by Salmond to approach Henry McLeish, the former Labour first minister, and keen proponent of greater devolution. But McLeish turned down the proposals, likely sensing the political risks for a former Labour leader to run a campaign in opposition to his own party’s strict policy on the referendum.

In an October 2011 interview with the Guardian, Salmond made it clear that he was considering a two-question ballot, describing fiscal autonomy without full independence as “a very popular option”. But the efforts to assemble a coalition to back devo max were making little progress. The Liberal Democrats, the most devoted proponents of devolution among the UK parties, rejected the idea after an approach from Salmond’s allies. Willie Rennie, the Scottish Lib Dem Leader, told the Guardian at the time that Salmond could never sell the idea to his own party. “Activists in the SNP scent blood,” Rennie said. “They think they can win, and they will find it difficult that independence could win a majority but doesn’t win because ‘devo max’ is even more popular.”

It was about to become clear to Salmond as well. In the spring of 2012, the first minister had a difficult and decisive meeting with Ben Thomson. It became clear that the template Thomson was willing to campaign for was simply not “max” enough for Salmond, who wanted every tax and welfare power available. “I can’t sell that to my party,” Salmond said, angrily.

“The first minister was slightly irritated,” Bell recalled. With no coalition of civic or business leaders willing to lead a devo-max campaign, Salmond’s multi-option ballot had collapsed.

January 2012: Cameron’s surprise offer

Salmond’s stunning victory in May 2011 had made a referendum inevitable, but its details were yet to be determined. Michael Moore, a tall and gentle-mannered former chartered accountant who had become Scotland secretary when his Liberal Democrat colleague Danny Alexander was moved to the Treasury, was soon hauled before the coalition’s most important decision-making body to discuss the Scottish question.

The Quad, where the most senior members of the coalition thrash out their differences, is not the most collegiate of environments, Moore recalled. Its members include Cameron, chancellor George Osborne and Moore’s two most senior colleagues: deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander. Moore recalled that Cameron and Osborne had initially flirted with a harder line. “The Tories were all totally gung-ho and it was all about ‘seizing control’, the initiative and all this sort of stuff. And it all was, dare I say it, pretty macho, testosterone-fuelled stuff and ‘only by showing them I’m the leader will we get things done’ kind of thing,” Moore said.

Moore and Alexander cautioned strongly against any plan for a Westminster-controlled referendum run by an English Tory government – that would be political poison in Scotland, a misstep capable of transforming minority support for independence into victory for the SNP. But Osborne and Cameron, Moore continued, were aware of the risks: posh Tories don’t play well in Scotland. A senior Downing Street source said Osborne simply wanted to ensure every option on the referendum was explored: “The overall approach was don’t give the SNP any reason to feel that this vote is anything other than totally fair.”

At no point was serious consideration given to blocking a referendum, the Downing Street source continued. “It was thought that that would definitely lead to a profound sense of grievance and injustice which the SNP would continue to exploit,” he explained. “It was far better to stop the momentum because it was assumed that if you had a referendum, which was legal, fair and decisive, that it would be decisive and that once you had that, that would be the end of it.” What emerged, partly at the prompting of Alexander and Moore, was the final and ultimately successful option: the bold and unexpected decision to help Salmond stage his referendum. In an effort to seize the initiative, the UK government would agree to give Holyrood the legal and constitutional authority to stage the ballot – a power it did not then have.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On the Andrew Marr show, David Cameron offers an independence ballot (with strings attached) to Scottish leader Alex Salmond. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

Cameron chose the BBC1 Andrew Marr show on Sunday 8 January, in his first interview of the new year, to disclose out of the blue that the UK government would offer Salmond a legally-constituted referendum. But there were strings, one of which was that Salmond must hold it within 18 months and most only pose one question. “We owe the Scottish people something that is fair, legal and decisive, so in the coming days we will be setting out clearly what the legal situation is,” the prime minister said.

Salmond was stunned by the unexpected concession, which seemed to have deprived him of the opportunity to attack Westminster for meddling in Scottish matters. But Cameron had left the precise terms of the deal ambiguous, and someone close to No 10 began briefing that Westminster rather than Holyrood might run the referendum – allowing Salmond to accuse the government of bullying and causing 24 hours of chaos within the coalition.

That Tuesday, as planned, Moore set out the details of the UK government proposal in a Commons statement. The UK would hand Holyrood the temporary power to hold a legal referendum, with three primary conditions: it would be overseen by the Electoral Commission, there would be only one question, and the referendum would be staged by the end of 2013 – at least a year earlier than Salmond wanted.

“I did with my statement in the Commons and halfway through it, Salmond went out to Charlotte Square in Edinburgh and said there will be a referendum in the autumn of 2014,” Moore recalled. “He was furious, it’s quite funny to see the images of that day because he hated the fact that we had put ourselves firmly in the game.”

Once the referendum talks began, Salmond’s lead negotiator, Bruce Crawford, then the SNP’s constitutional affairs minister, continued to press the multi-option referendum. The Quad had decided a single question would be their “red line” issue: on no account would the UK government accept a multi-option referendum.

Cameron had already decided on his tactics. In February 2012, the night before an official speech in Edinburgh, where he confirmed he would consider future concessions on devolution, the prime minister held a private dinner at the Peat Inn near St Andrew’s, where he gamed his negotiation strategy with a select group of close advisers, including his special adviser on Scotland, Andrew Dunlop. According to Alan Cochrane, the Scottish editor of the Daily Telegraph, Cameron revealed he was prepared to give way on issues that the UK government had opposed in public in order to force Salmond to accept a single yes-no question.

Salmond could choose a referendum date, introduce votes for 16- and 17-year-olds, and propose the question. Cameron would insist, however, that the process was overseen under UK referendum legislation by the Electoral Commission – a position which also required the commission to scrutinise the fairness of the question. And if Salmond failed to agree the deal or stalled for too long, Cameron was prepared for “the nuclear option” of staging a Westminster-run referendum. “Let him boycott it,” Cameron apparently told the dinner.

What Cameron did not know was that Salmond already believed his plan for a multi-option referendum had no chance of succeeding, as Kevin Pringle has now admitted. Salmond continued to talk of multiple questions, but it was nothing more than a bargaining chip for the talks – a way to extract concessions from Cameron on other issues: the timing of the poll, the wording of the question, and the franchise. “Once we were into 2012, it was pretty clear it was going to be a yes-no referendum,” Pringle recalled.

The final decision to kill off the multi-option referendum once and for all was made at a Scottish government cabinet meeting in late spring 2012, when Salmond called for a vote. “Alex said to the cabinet: are we going to go for it, or not? People voted to go for the one question,” said one observer. Sturgeon voted for a single question, as did Crawford. Salmond abruptly accepted the decision. It was never made public: Crawford continued to leave the multi-option referendum on the table during the talks for the remainder of the summer.

Pringle said that left the UK government fighting to protect a principle that Salmond’s team was already ready to concede: “They made their one red line the binary referendum so in that sense they did kind of … they played into our hands in terms of making a presentation like that.”

The way was clear for the Scottish people to be offered a binary choice: yes or no to continued membership of the UK.

May 2012: The campaigns begin

With typical theatricality, Salmond launched the Yes Scotland campaign on 25 May 2012 at a multiplex cinema in central Edinburgh. The grizzled Scots actor Brian Cox, then living in New York, and the more elfin Alan Cumming, another US exile, were sent on stage, as was the folk singer Dougie MacLean, to perform his nationalist anthem Caledonia in a duet with a young Glaswegian indie singer Lou Hickey. Touted as a cross-party campaign, it was an odd event staged in a vast but only partly filled theatre: Yes Scotland then had no staff and no base; Scottish Green party leader Patrick Harvie, eventually appointed as a Yes Scotland board member, came on stage despite holding deep reservations about Salmond’s motives. Salmond sent the former BBC Scotland news executive Blair Jenkins, soon to be Yes Scotland’s chief executive but then only a yes vote supporter, to brief the press, yet was unable to answer any key questions about its policies, structure or plans.

In contrast to Yes Scotland’s razzmatazz, the Better Together launch at Napier University’s futuristic silver auditorium at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh a month later was a far more sober affair. In lieu of movie stars, it featured the dry, uncharismatic former chancellor Alistair Darling and a full set of Scotland’s unionist party leaders: Johann Lamont, for Labour, Ruth Davidson for the Tories and the Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie. All three had recently been elected to replace the party leaders who had resigned in the wake of Salmond’s landslide Holyrood election victory in 2011; they looked slightly awkward, out of place in public together.

Yet that understated launch was misleading. Better Together had already begun doing detailed homework on the battle ahead – before its formal launch. At the advice of George Osborne, Darling headhunted Andrew Cooper, one of the UK’s leading and most trusted political pollsters, who co-founded the polling firm Populus, to do the campaign’s voter analysis.

Cooper, who was ennobled this year after serving two years as David Cameron’s director of strategy in Downing Street, came heavily recommended by his fellow peer Peter Mandelson. Using Better Together’s first slab of donations, Cooper embarked in May 2012 on a poll of 4,000 voters – far larger than the 1,000 or so voters normally surveyed for a commercial poll, to delve into the Scottish electorate’s attitudes to independence and the union. It took over half an hour for questioners to complete the exhaustive questions, which also tested the popularity of individual no campaign leaders. It will never be published – too much “dirty washing”, said one Better Together executive. By late 2013, that exercise had been repeated, and Better Together had conducted a series of focus groups solely with floating voters.

The results were to define the no campaign’s entire strategy. Known as segmentation studies, the exhaustive series of questions led Cooper to conclude that the electorate was split three ways: the largest group, nearly 40% of Scotland’s 4m voters, were committed no voters. They were identified by Cooper as “mature status quo” and “hardpressed unionists”. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the committed yes voters, who made up just under 30% of voters. They were “Scottish exceptionalists”, those nationalists who believed Scotland was preeminent and would vote yes even if it impoverished the country, and “blue collar Bravehearts”, those working class, largely male, voters who identified themselves as Scottish, not British.

“What you found was you had these two very, very dug in yes groups, these two very dug in no groups,” Cooper says as he explains why Better Together decided not to concentrate precious resources on these voters on the grounds that they that had made up their mind. The campaign instead focused entirely on undecided voters, roughly a third of the electorate, who broke down into two groups. The majority were “comfortable pragmatists” while a minority were “uncommitted security seekers”.

In the second study, conducted towards the end of last year, Cooper found out that more than 40% of the electorate were likely to vote yes. The challenge was to craft a message that would win over “comfortable pragmatists” and “uncommitted security seekers” who felt little attachment to the UK but who would stop short of voting for independence if they felt the economic risks were too great. This led to a campaign based on an appeal to the head, rather than the heart, highlighting the economic risks of splitting from the UK. This was known inside Better Together as Project Fear – a phrase exploited by the yes side.

“Above all the thing that defined them was ‘heart says yes, head says no’,” Cooper said. “These people were only willing to [vote yes] if they felt it wasn’t associated with very strong risk. Therefore the campaign strategy was keep those people focused on the risk.”

As Better Together drew up their campaign, Cooper said there was no point in trying to win over the middle group of voters with appeals about common bonds with the rest of the UK. “We basically took a view that they were so far gone and in a sense this was a very sobering statement of how much, below the surface, over the previous 10 years, the centre of gravity of Scottish public opinion had shifted in favour of the idea of independence,” he says.

Better Together reinforced the strategy with two key messages – independence would be irreversible and that it was in the interests of Scotland to vote no. The thinking underpinned the next nine months of no campaigning: the risks that Scotland could not use the pound, fears about the health and strength of Scotland’s economy without the UK single market, or that it would be unable to join the European Union. In short, could any of those protections be guaranteed by Salmond and Yes Scotland? No, they could not, said Better Together.

Despite the chaotic start for Yes Scotland, the SNP had also done its own polling. It broadly confirmed Better Together’s findings: it was the economy and the practical purpose of independence which mattered most. “The specifics were very much what’s the point, what would it be for them, would it be financially viable, essentially all of those sorts of issues, the practicality and financial affordability, and viability and the purpose,” Pringle said. “They didn’t need to hear that they were Scottish, they knew that.”

And those focus groups formulated Yes Scotland’s eventual campaign: an effort to persuade sceptical voters that independence was a natural next step after devolution. Their line of attack with undecided voters was: “We take good decisions which most people in Scotland want – if we take good decisions in these areas, then we can take equally good decisions and get good outcomes and improve lives and opportunities for people in Scotland in these other areas too.”

But, admitted Pringle, their polling also showed that women were more sceptical – or “questioning”, he said, and that new 16 and 17 year-old voters were, to the SNP’s disappointment, a far more volatile electorate than they had hoped.

“I think it certainly came across in focus groups that women, and we did say this all the way through the campaign, Nicola said it a lot, not that they were necessarily more hostile but they were more questioning.

“One analogy that was used, and I can’t exactly remember where this came from, is that it was a bit analogous to moving house. While yes, you are moving to a better place and there is a good argument for it, the women would tend to worry about the practical arrangements in having to change all your accounts and do the practical bits of moving.”

And both camps were using highly sophisticated marketing and consumer profiling software, based on the Mosaic system heavily used by retailers and advertising agencies, to analyse voter canvassing returns and polling data, to identify their target vote and divide up the electorate into even more detailed segments based on factors such as income, jobs, family size, age, location and likely attitudes.

Better Together bought a bespoke profiling system from Mosaic’s makers Experian and – “to annoy the nationalists” – called it Patriot. Using around 400 data points, it soaked up all the Populus polling figures, data from Better Together canvassing returns, social media contacts, phone calls and surveys. It was backed up by data from Better Together’s online campaigning consultants Blue State Digital, the US-based specialists who helped President Barack Obama win two consecutive terms.

Better Together nailed down who Scotland’s undecided voters were and where they lived: it treated Scotland as one vast marginal constituency, not a patchwork of regions. For Yes Scotland, their Mosaic-style profiling was used to confirm what they believed was true, that they could win and that a majority of voters would swing to back independence.

That modelling confirmed that older voters were more hostile, but told Yes Scotland that younger voters and those with young families were voting yes. “We moved ahead in both those categories, from memory, quite early in relative terms of the campaign, certainly before the end of 2013 we were ahead with both those groups,” said Jenkins.

And that made Yes and the SNP far more confident about their chances than the evidence from a series of commercial polls and Better Together’s analysis told them. Their reading of in-house data led Yes Scotland to believe yes support was several per cent higher than public polls showed. They believed the commercial polls failed to capture non-voters and the poorest in marginal housing schemes.

“We expected to win, that’s the first thing to say,” Jenkins recalls. “We weren’t simply saying that, we did expect to win, and all the information we were getting back from around the country in terms of canvass returns, but [also] just the kind of very seasoned campaigners who could just sniff the air and tell you how things were going were coming back with pretty bullish assessments.”

“We always believed that the published polls were not getting it right in terms of where the campaigns were, primarily because they were under sampling people who don’t normally vote.” Yes Scotland believed those rare or reluctant voters – mostly poor, working class voters in marginalised communities, were heavily inclined to vote yes and would turn out in far higher numbers than a normal election.

“Borne out by the canvassing returns we were getting from areas with a typically low turn out, that that would work in our favour, the high turn out would work out in our favour,” Jenkins said.

And those optimistic assessments – wildly over-optimistic according to Better Together’s judgment, were being amplified by upbeat analysis from Yes Scotland’s in-house pollsters, a Canadian based company called First Contact which predicted by polling day that yes would win by 54% to 46% for no.

November 2013: Battle lines drawn

On a chilly, damp and overcast morning in late November 2013, Alex Salmond made the yes campaign’s most important announcement before the final countdown to the referendum the following summer. In the shadow of the mighty Finnieston Crane on the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow – a symbol of the city’s ship building past – Scotland’s first minister moved to show that he was leading a sovereign government-in-waiting with the launch of a 670-page white paper outlining his blueprint for independence. It was entitled Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland.

The no side struck back within three months when George Osborne definitively ruled out one of the main claims in the white paper – that an independent Scotland would be able to form a currency union with the remainder of the UK. The battle lines had been drawn for the rest of the campaign. The yes campaign said that the chunky white paper, published under the full authority of the Scottish government, showed that it had a credible plan for independence covering defence, welfare, health and – yes – the currency. The no side depicted the document as flaky and said that its unreliable claims on forming a currency union with the rest of the UK highlighted the pro-UK side’s key message – independence posed a dangerous economic risk.

The squabbling over currency was hardly in keeping with the ambitions of yes supporters in the runup to the publication of the white paper, a document likened in some quarters to the historic Declaration of Arbroath of 1320. In a letter to Pope John XXII – composed in Latin, naturally – the noblemen of Scotland declared that as long as they remained alive “never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule”.

Salmond, who took to the stage at the Glasgow Science Centre on the south side of the Clyde with his trusted deputy Sturgeon, deployed ambitious – though rather less bloodthirsty – language. “Our generation has the opportunity to stop imagining and wondering and start building the better Scotland we all know is possible,” he declared in the preface to the document.

The appearance of Salmond marked a deliberate move by the SNP to raise gradually the campaigning profile of the first minister who had increasingly allowed Sturgeon to take the reins of the campaign. “Alex’s job was to come in in a big way when the white paper was launched – [that was] actually the period of the campaign when it becomes the people’s campaign as opposed to the media campaign,” said Pringle.

Better Together, which was conscious that the SNP had spent months marshalling the Scottish government’s civil service resources behind the white paper, was nervous that the document could present a substantial threat. Strategists took the precaution of setting up a war room at the Dynamic Earth science centre in Edinburgh – later to host the yes camp’s wake on election night – drafting in economists from London and experts on devolution such as former Whitehall civil servant Professor Jim Gallagher. The no side had even drew up a fake white paper beforehand in a bid to predict Salmond’s case. In the event, they found the white paper was so insubstantial they had very little to say. “We drilled it and drilled it and got everything ready and I remember immediately after Salmond had finished speaking on the white paper, we looked at each other because we brought economists from London to look at it and we thought – is that it,” says Blair McDougall, Better Together’s chief executive.

Over in Glasgow, Sturgeon, the MSP for the city’s Southside constituency who has a more natural appeal to women and to voters generally in the densely populated central belt, took the lion’s share of the work for the SNP on the day of the white paper launch. The deputy first minister embarked on an early morning round of broadcast interviews before the launch of the paper and then led for the Scottish government in a subsequent debate on the document at Holyrood. In an interview on the Today programme Sturgeon echoed previous comments by Salmond when she warned that an independent Scotland might refuse to accept its share of the UK’s liabilities if London rejected a currency union. “It is not the scenario I am arguing for but it is the logical conclusion of the UK’s position,” she told the Today programme, inadvertently preparing the ground for the definitive ruling out of a currency union by the pro-UK side.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Moore faces the Quad of David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander. Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck

Alistair Darling, who joined forces with the prime minister’s Scotland adviser Andrew Dunlop to persuade the chancellor to rule out a currency union, warned that Sturgeon’s plan would see an independent Scotland start life as a debtor nation. His main argument was that a currency union would be bad for Scotland. “If you end up in a situation where you are sharing a currency, your economic policy has to be agreed by your large neighbour,” a Better Together source says.

Dunlop and Darling were a curious pairing. The softly spoken Dunlop, a graduate of Glasgow University who moved south and is now a Conservative councillor in Horsham, West Sussex, was a special adviser in Downing Street under Margaret Thatcher during the seismic event which defined Scottish politics in the final decade of the last century – the introduction of the poll tax. Darling, a former supporter of the Trotskyite International Marxist Group, was an angry young Labour MP in his second year in parliament when Thatcher wrote off Tory prospects for a generation in Scotland by allowing the poll tax to be introduced in 1989, a year earlier than in England.

But the two understated Scots formed a formidable partnership as they persuaded George Osborne in early 2014 that the Treasury needed to harden its position, outlined in an analysis paper in April 2013, that a currency union was “highly unlikely”. The chancellor needed to say that hell would freeze over before the rest of the UK would agree. A Better Together source says: “We [were] going to be asked one way or another is this going to happen or not? Telling people into August would look like desperation, so it was a gamble, but it was better earlier on to say it’s not going to happen.” Osborne, who freely admits that he has little personal feel for Scotland because the baronetcy he will one day inherit originates from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, felt reasonably relaxed. He wholly accepted the judgment of Darling and Dunlop.

A man familiar with the bruising battles for independence in Quebec – the Canadian governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney – set the scene at the end of January for the hardening of the Treasury’s position. In a speech at the George Hotel, in the heart of Edinburgh’s 18th-century New Town, the governor suggested that a currency union could work in principle. But he warned that it would involve “some ceding of national sovereignty” by an independent Scotland which would have to pool as much of 25% of its GDP with the remainder of the UK. In remarks which came as music to the ears of the no camp, the governor warned that the eurozone crisis had served as stark example of the risks of setting up a poorly structured currency union: a strong currency union would weaken its members’ independence.

Carney, who stopped short of reminding his audience that Salmond had once championed euro membership, insisted he was neutral on the currency union. He also made a point of holding informal talks over breakfast with Salmond, who declared that Carney would, in the governor’s words, provide a “technocratic assessment” of how a currency union would work. The first minister left it to his finance secretary John Swinney to respond to the speech, saying that Carney had provided a “serious and sensible analysis” of the workings of a currency union.

Darling, who had asked Osborne after he assumed the leadership of Better Together in 2012 for Treasury back-up, had his ammunition as he joined forces with Dunlop to embark on a final round of discussions ahead of the chancellor’s announcement in a speech in Edinburgh on 13 February. Dunlop had his work cut out because David Cameron delivered one of his most important speeches of the campaign on 7 February, dubbed a love letter to Scotland, when he travelled to the Olympic Velodrome in east London to hail the “brave, brilliant, buccaneering” spirit of the UK. In an echo of the appeal to Quebec to remain in Canada in the final days of the 1995 referendum, the prime minister said: “This is our home, and I could not bear to see it torn apart.”

Calculation, rather than emotion, was the main factor in the countdown to Osborne’s speech. Darling, who had been briefed on the Carney speech, spoke to the shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who agreed to endorse the chancellor’s statement on the same day. Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat Treasury chief secretary, who was naturally in regular contact with the chancellor on the cabinet’s Scotland committee and on Treasury business, agreed to weigh in too.

An unlikely coalition of sworn enemies came to a juddering and messy end as the UK parties bickered

Alexander says it was important to change stance because a definitive no was the natural conclusion of further analysis by the Treasury. The “sheer chutzpah” of Salmond, who had responded to Carney’s warnings by saying that a currency union could work, was the final straw. “Given that what we all knew was that there wasn’t going to be a currency union, actually we kind of owed it to the people to be straight about that,” he said.

Osborne telephoned Balls on the eve of his speech to confirm that an unmistakable joint message would be delivered by the Treasury spokesmen for the three main UK parties. With the way clear, Osborne travelled to Scotland to deliver his blunt message against a spectacular backdrop of a sunny Edinburgh Castle from the city’s Point Hotel. The chancellor embarked on a point-by-point demolition of the arguments in favour of a currency union and then ended his speech with the warning: “If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the pound.” The chancellor’s intervention was reinforced by an unprecedented breach of constitutional convention by Sir Nick Macpherson, the Treasury’s permanent secretary, who released a letter in which he concluded that a currency union would be out of the question. Fellow Whitehall permanent secretaries, known as the “Wednesday morning colleagues” after their weekly meetings, were said to have muttered of the Macpherson letter: never again.

All sides knew the speech was a gamble on the grounds that the SNP would claim, as it did, that London was bullying the people of Scotland. “A lot of people were worried about it ... and agonised about it,” one Better Together source says, recalling how Balls and Osborne raised concerns about whether the intervention would look like bullying. They were advised that the announcement had to be made.

Gordon Brown, who was eventually to play an instrumental role in saving the union in the final phase of the campaign, agreed with the announcement but felt that the tone and the messenger had been a mistake. On the day after Osborne’s speech Brown phoned his former protege Ed Balls to say that he had struck the right tone in a Scotsman article in which the shadow chancellor had argued that a currency union would be wrong for Scotland. Balls, who offered to travel to Scotland to reinforce his message, saw the Treasury documents accompanying the chancellor’s document though not until the morning of the speech. The shadow chancellor thought the Macpherson letter and accompanying Treasury documents had a familiar feel. “It was very much consistent with the five tests [on the euro in 1997 drawn up by Balls],” one Labour source said.

Sturgeon now admits that the SNP lost the referendum after failing to overcome people’s fears on the economy

Others had serious doubts. Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, Labour’s longest serving Scottish first minister between 2001-2007, praised Carney’s speech. But he said of the interventions by the chancellor, his Treasury deputy and the shadow chancellor: “Then in came Osborne, Alexander and Balls to say no way, never, ever we will not allow this, Scotland cannot have the pound. It just looked anti-Scottish again.” Michael Moore, who had been sacked as Scotland secretary a few months earlier in the autumn of 2013, says: “Tightening the position from ‘highly unlikely’ was a mistake. It was one of those panicky quick decisions that has long-term reverberations that aren’t necessarily what you want.”

Darling and Alexander were adamant that, for all their fears, they made the right decision on the currency. “Ultimately they [the yes side] lost because they didn’t have an economic argument,” one senior Better Together source said.

Salmond will argue to his dying days – no doubt clutching a copy of a Guardian article from March 2014 which quoted an anonymous UK minister saying that “of course” a currency union would be formed – that the chancellor’s intervention amounted to “bluff, bluster and bullying”. Sturgeon now admits that the SNP had not anticipated the pro-UK’s side early intervention on the currency and, in the end, lost the referendum after failing to overcome people’s fears on the economy. The new Scotland first minister says of the currency: “It was always going to be one of the most difficult issues for us. We always knew that ... I think we went a long way to countering the scares, we wouldn’t have got to 45% if we hadn’t. But ultimately we didn’t do quite enough with enough people to get them over that fear barrier and that’s why we didn’t win.”

The Better Together camp were not to know the extent of the jitters among their opponents as Salmond airily dismissed their warnings in public. The no side headed into spring in nervous mood as polls showed that a larger number of people agreed with Salmond’s assessment that they were bluffing. Britain’s previous prime minister was uneasy, a sentiment that was felt – it later turned out – all the way up to the highest turrets in the land.

• In part 2 tomorrow: Alistair Darling and Alex Salmond go head-to-head on TV, and Gordon Brown rides to the rescue

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