The Dream Shall Never Die: 100 Days that Changed Scotland Forever

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.