Much criticism focuses unfairly on the timing, which results in a drawn-out campaign. Cameron’s response is that he doesn’t want to impose any set date on Scotland, which in any case he considers subordinate to his main priority in the negotiations: achieving a single in/out question. A more spun-out process will, he argues back, allow more time for the Scottish case to be scrutinised, and for the economic recovery to feed through north of the border.
Back in October 2012, when he and Salmond had signed the Edinburgh Agreement for the referendum to take place in September 2014, the result looked secure, a chance to lance an undoubted boil which might only have become more angry. This was his opportunity to show decisive leadership and to be the prime minister who resolved the Scottish Question for at least a generation. He is happy to give the Better Together campaign a wide measure of autonomy, thinking Alistair Darling will be the reassuring leader who will best serve the cause. Day-to-day dealings are delegated to Osborne. Darling and Osborne respect each other, and talk regularly. Cameron understands totally that he is seen in Scotland as an Englishman and a Conservative, and knows that the campaign has to be led by Scots in Scotland. He sees his role as rising above party politics and using the authority of the PM’s office to make the case across the whole of the United Kingdom. Danny Alexander and the Scotland Secretary Alistair Carmichael, who succeeded Michael Moore in October 2013, are now the principal personalities for the government running the campaign north of the border. Increasingly, figures including Lord Strathclyde, Leader of the House of Lords until January 2013, believe that Cameron is allowing himself to be edged out of the debate in Scotland by Labour and the Lib Dems, with their own agendas. Indeed the Labour and Lib Dem powers in Better Together are so convinced of the toxicity of the Tory brand that they block IDS coming to Scotland in April 2014 to launch a paper on welfare and pensions.2 ‘We handed too much over to the Labour Party,’ Strathclyde says, ‘we paid for the campaign and they ran it – in an uninspiring way.’3
From January to September 2014, Cameron visits Scotland on twelve occasions, and delivers six major speeches. From Easter, Scotland becomes a standing item at the 8.30 a.m. meeting in the PM’s room. Andrew Dunlop, the Scotland specialist from the Policy Unit, gives a daily update, including the latest polls. Cameron meets Darling regularly and is often on the phone to Scotland. In the latter stages, a daily meeting is convened in Ed Llewellyn’s office with all the key staff. The atmosphere becomes palpably tenser by the week.
The Olympic Park in London is the venue for Cameron’s first major speech of the year, on 7 February 2014. He wants it to be known that he is taking the lead and deliberately chooses a non-Scottish venue to deliver the speech, which is directed to the whole country and only indirectly to those just in Scotland. His theme is that the rest of the country wants Scotland to remain in the union. The vote may only be exercised by the Scots, but it matters greatly to the rest of the UK. ‘Centuries of history hang in the balance,’ he says, and if Scotland becomes independent ‘there will be no going back … seven months to save the most extraordinary country in history … over three centuries we have lived together, worked together, and frankly, we’ve got together: getting married, having children, moving back and forth across our borders’.4 He finds the speech liberating, happy he has found his own voice: ‘I am as proud of my Scottish heritage as I am of my English or Welsh heritage,’ he says. Number 10 are delighted later that month when the speech may have spurred David Bowie to become involved: his acceptance speech at the Brit Awards, read by Kate Moss, ends with the impassioned plea ‘Scotland, stay with us.’5 ‘Cameron was the only Conservative who got the tone right,’ says Clegg. ‘Unlike the Conservative Party which had a complete tin ear, he spoke with a civilised and respectful tone.’6 Cameron keeps a regular eye on the polls throughout the spring and early summer, which give little cause for concern. Andrew Cooper’s regular bulletins suggest all continues to be well: 40% of Scotland’s 4 million voters are, he says, still committed to rejecting independence, 30% are committed to ‘Yes’, while the remaining 30% are undecided.
Ever since the Edinburgh Agreement, Salmond has been goading Cameron to come to Scotland and become directly involved. ‘He makes every effort to drag DC into every debate. He wants to personalise the referendum into him vs Cameron, to make it Scotland vs England. But we won’t let that happen,’ says an aide. Salmond steps up the pressure on Cameron in the autumn of 2013, dubbing him ‘feart’ for refusing to engage with him in a television debate. ‘I seem to have got a new pen pal … almost on a daily basis,’ Cameron tells a fringe meeting at the Tory Party conference that September, referring to the very regular communications he is receiving from Salmond about the debate.7
On 26 November 2013, Salmond launches the Scottish government’s White Paper on its vision for an independent nation, which Number 10 think is effectively demolished the following day by Darling. While Cameron remains aloof from the street fight, Osborne gets his hands dirtier, mindful that without his pressing, Cameron might never have decided to have the referendum. In Glasgow, in April 2013, Osborne had delivered a hard-hitting speech saying that if Scotland becomes independent, there is no guarantee that currency union will continue. In a speech in Edinburgh on 13 February 2014, he now goes further: ‘If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the UK pound … there’s no legal reason why the rest of the UK would need to share its currency with Scotland.’8 The evening before delivering it, Osborne phones Ed Balls to ensure that he is in full agreement. Treasury head Nicholas Macpherson provides further endorsement in a letter which concludes that a currency union will be out of the question, a move subsequently criticised for breaching Civil Service neutrality.9 Number 10 knows that Osborne’s strong line will provoke visceral reaction and is therefore a risk, but believe that the Scottish electorate has the time to get over their anger and absorb the underlying message. Salmond dismisses Osborne’s intervention as ‘bluff, bluster and bullying’. The polls suggest that the speech has indeed created a negative reaction, bolstering those who say they will vote for independence. Within Downing Street, voices are critical of ‘George’s megaphone message from London’, telling the Scots ‘they will lose the pound, and that every military base will be relocated to England. But it’s not a brilliant way of doing things,’ says one. Clegg is also worried about Osborne’s strident tone: ‘His approach was “Let’s go in aggressively, let’s hammer Salmond.”’10
Support for the Better Together campaign is not growing. Fresh impetus is needed. It comes on 2 June with the Strathclyde Commission, unveiled by Lord Strathclyde and Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives. This recommends giving Scotland further devolution and attracts widespread praise. Strathclyde and Davidson ‘may together save the union … For the first time in decades a Tory idea has been greeted with approval north of the border, being called “revolutionary”, “game-changing” and “thoughtful” rather than the usual “pompous” and “arrogant”,’ writes Alice Thomson in The Times.11 President Obama offers another intervention. Number 10 have long been debating who they might encourage to speak up in favour of the United Kingdom. The first missile emanates from the White House, who are very concerned by the prospect of Scottish independence, not least for defence and security reasons. The White House ‘tell us privately that they desperately hope Scotland will not become independent’, says one diplomat at the British Embassy. Obama knows he is bound to be asked for his view: equally, he is alive to the risk of any intervention being seen as counterproductive. So he runs what he wants to say past Number 10, before announcing on 5 June that he hopes the United Kingdom will stay ‘strong, robust and united’.12
A few days later on 11 June, the author J. K. Rowling donates £1 million to the ‘No’ cause, describing independence as ‘a historically bad mistake’.13 It enables Better Together to offer a more vigorous campaign over the final hundred days. On 5 August, Darling and Salmond go head-to-head for the first televised deb
ate. Salmond appears tired and nervous, Darling far more confident: ‘Any eight-year-old can tell you the flag of a country, the capital of a country and its currency … you can’t tell us what currency we will have. What is an eight-year-old going to make of that?’ Before the second debate on 25 August, this time a victory for Salmond, comes a furore over the NHS. Yes Scotland begin to argue that the NHS will not be safe if Scotland remains within the union: Tory privatisation and spending cuts will harm the quality of provision. It is an effective ploy and Better Together estimate that it cost them over 100,000 votes, amounting to some three percentage points.14
Momentum is now firmly with Yes Scotland. On 2 September, a YouGov poll in The Times reports that over August, the Better Together lead has shrunk from 14 to 6 percentage points. It is a desperate blow. Carmichael tells Cabinet hours later that ‘this is a time to hold your nerve and take the prospect seriously, but we have to stick to the strategy’.15 Whitehall goes into rapid action, examining how London might extend Scotland’s powers, while at the same time looking at what further can be done to warn Scotland of the dangers of independence. Within Downing Street, Cameron’s team decide to mobilise more business voices speaking out against independence. At the most secret and confidential levels, discussions are taking place between Number 10 and the Palace about whether the Queen might be willing to express her views before it is too late.16
The need for urgency is underlined on 7 September when a YouGov poll in the Sunday Times shows that the ‘Yes’ campaign is now in the lead, with 51% to 49%. Cameron is on his annual visit to Balmoral when the poll is published. Neither head of state nor head of government is remotely amused. Back in London, Jeremy Heywood has been talking to Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, who is in Balmoral with the PM and his highly respected principal private secretary, Chris Martin, about the constitutional implications for the Queen of a ‘Yes’ vote. They are mindful of the furore when, during the Silver Jubilee in 1977, she spoke to the nation about ‘the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom’.17
Cameron and his team have always been scrupulous about not revealing any conversations which take place with the Queen. No one will know for many years what exactly was said between the monarch and her prime minister. But the conversation over breakfast that morning, when the Sunday Times headline reads ‘Yes vote leads Scots poll’, must have been filled with tension.18 The Queen keeps her counsel. One week later, after church on Sunday 14 September, she delivers carefully nuanced words to a well-wisher: ‘Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.’19 The next day, an ICM poll in the Telegraph shows the ‘Yes’ campaign ahead of Better Together. Many wonder if the panic is overdone; some twenty opinion polls are conducted between 1–17 September by a variety of organisations: the vast majority show ‘No’ ahead, albeit by a narrowing margin.
The polls galvanise Number 10. The response is: ‘What can we throw at this?’ ‘We are looking for everything we can humanly do to get to the right result. The PM is petrified. It weighs very heavily on his mind. It is a really big deal for him. You can tell when he is really tense because he is tetchy.’ Cameron has been deeply shaken. ‘Shit, we might lose this’, is his reaction. Collectively, Cameron’s team feel that Better Together lacks dynamism, and they have to take more control themselves.
Their cause is helped by the market reaction to the apparent rise in support for independence. On 8 September £2.6 billion is wiped off the value of leading companies with Scottish links on the FTSE 100, and the pound weakens against both the dollar and the euro. The FTSE 100 falls by over twenty points after the polls.20 On 10 September, Standard Life say they will move parts of their business to England in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote. On 11 September, Lloyds, which owns the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, say they might also consider relocating. These are not random announcements. ‘The biggest contribution the prime minister made to the whole campaign, frankly, was getting the banks and pension firms to speak out. It was all orchestrated from London with the PM making calls to business leaders,’ says one insider. A core aim of Cameron’s team is to shake up the middle classes in Scotland and convince them how bad independence would be for them, in their view. Andrew Feldman is deputed to raise more money and do his bit to galvanise the business community. A rally in support of the union takes place on Monday 15 September in Trafalgar Square, with Sir Bob Geldof, Eddie Izzard and Dan Snow speaking.21
Slowly, the ‘No’ camp begins to regain the initiative in a frenetic final ten days and outstrips the ‘Yes’ campaign, which is beginning to lose momentum. A major effort is made to sway the press: Cameron, Osborne and Craig Oliver lobby where they can, and Michael Gove writes an article in the Daily Mail.22 Rupert Murdoch, who had flown independently to Aberdeen to test opinion on the ground, is coming off the fence. He reads Gove’s piece and wants the same line repeated in the Sun in Scotland. The argument convinces him that the union should be maintained and the stance of one of Scotland’s best-selling newspapers changes from pro-independence to neutrality.
On 10 September, PMQs are abandoned as Cameron, Clegg and Miliband all fly north to make the case for the union. Craig Oliver is with Cameron in the car on the way from Edinburgh airport to address an audience in the headquarters of Scottish Widows. ‘I’m thinking of saying, “You shouldn’t vote yes just to give the Tories a kick,”’ Cameron tells his communications director. ‘Good,’ Oliver replies. He thinks it might be an effective way for the PM to show the depth of his feeling. But some in government would rather he doesn’t speak at all. ‘Can you hide the PM?’ Danny Alexander writes in a text to Oliver. The Chief Secretary has been talking to Miliband about the damage the PM might do to the ‘No’ campaign by adopting a high profile, having been a subdued presence for so long. ‘Remember, he is the prime minister. You can’t hide him away,’ Oliver texts back. They end up having ‘quite a robust exchange’. The spat prompts Cameron’s team again to wonder whether the Lib Dems and Labour might be putting their own party interests above the overall message.23 At Scottish Widows, Cameron is in raw and passionate mode as he delivers some of his most powerful words as PM:
I care far more about my country than I do about my party. I care hugely about this extraordinary country, this United Kingdom that we have built together. I would be heartbroken if this family of nations we have put together – and we have done such amazing things – was torn apart … You make a decision and five years later you can make another decision – if you are fed up with the effing Tories give them a kick and then maybe we will think again. This is a totally different decision to a general election. This is not a decision about the next five years. It is a decision about the next century.24
On Monday 15 September, three days before polling, Cameron makes his final visit of the campaign to deliver a speech at the Exhibition and Conference Centre in Aberdeen. His message emphasises what he regards as the risks of a ‘Yes’ vote:
We meet in a week that could change the United Kingdom forever … On Friday, people could be living in a different country, with a different place in the world and a different future ahead of it. This is a decision that could break up our family of nations, and rip Scotland from the rest of the UK. And we must be very clear. There’s no going back from this. No re-run. This is a once-and-for-all decision.25
The speech is written by Clare Foges at her very best. In an unusual move, the text is sent to Gordon Brown to ask for his comments. This is more than a trust-building exercise: they are genuinely interested in his views. Cameron’s team have been trying to engage his predecessor in the ‘No’ campaign since early 2013. They see him as ‘an Old Testament preacher’, as opposed to Darling, the ‘reassuring bank manager’. They certainly don’t want Brown to run the campaign, because he is so incorrigibly tribal, but they see his value as an ally. He possesses a unique ability to get out the Scottish Lab
our vote, helped by his impeccably Scottish background and his left-wing politics. But their early attempts to build bridges are rebuffed. ‘If I can’t be captain, I’m going to go off and do my own thing’, is the sense they have of him. Yet they keep trying. With his track record for twice keeping Britain out of the euro, in 1997 and 2003, they suggest he pen an article on the implications of the referendum for the pound. He agrees but they find him prickly. They are disappointed when a rather dry article appears in the Scottish tabloid the Daily Record in November 2013, which Brown refuses to publicise through appearances in the media.26
At Easter 2014, Brown has a change of heart, and he signals that he is willing to work with Better Together. They agree he should deliver a speech on pensions, which is helped by material from inside Whitehall. Number 10 even alter their plans to accommodate the speech, which Brown then gives on 21 April.27 Number 10 are not pleased to hear his suggestion that Cameron and Salmond should debate face-to-face, which Brown knows runs directly counter to the PM’s preference not to take part in broadcast debates. In May, Andrew Dunlop sees Brown in his office in the House of Commons. Brown is back to being prickly again, claiming that the campaign is too negative, and plays up the differences between his own views and those of Better Together. But in the final few days, galvanised by the narrowing polls, he springs back into action. He has several phone calls with Cameron, described as ‘quite cordial’, and accepts that the PM is sincere. Number 10 are pleased that he doesn’t brief journalists about the phone calls.
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