Salmond had planned his victory speech… but knew the game was up when the first result was announced

As the polls across Scotland closed at 10pm on September 18, 2014 – the day Scotland voted on whether to become independent – a select group of journalists received an excited phone call.

It was from the Yes campaign, sharing details of the next day’s victory speech by Alex Salmond, the First Minister and the man who led the campaign to break up Britain.

This was not just hubris, although there had been plenty of that in the last two and a half years.

During the long campaign, Nationalist MP Stewart Hosie, with unshakeable confidence, told a Labour colleague in the Commons tearoom that ‘of course’ Yes would win. There was simply no prospect of any other outcome.

And on the day of polling, that belief, that quasi-religious faith in the inevitability of their cause, was bolstered by a reputable polling organisation, who told Salmond and his team that not only would Scots vote Yes, they would do so by an eight point margin over No.

First Contact, which is based in Canada, even went so far as to reveal their predictions to the local media before the votes in

Scotland had been counted, telling the Toronto Star that it was ‘pretty confident’ that the Yes campaign was going to win.

Salmond’s daring gamble had apparently paid off. He’d taken support for independence from just 30 per cent in 2012 to more than 50 per cent now. History was being made, and he, Salmond, was making it. 

When the polling stations opened at 7am on that wet autumn Thursday, it was obvious that something momentous was indeed happening. Veteran campaigners had never seen queues of voters waiting patiently outside for the polls to open. Yet that’s what was happening now.

After the frenetic activity of the last two-and-a-half years, polling day itself felt as polling days often do – like an anticlimax.

There were no more press conferences, no more speeches and no more canvassing teams out to convince the fence-sitters.

The canvassers from both sides were still in full operation, but now their aim was not to convince; now their aim was to make sure that those they had identified as supporters actually came out and voted.

It turned out such effort was hardly necessary. Nearly 85 per cent of Scots – a higher turnout than at any general election in the century of women’s suffrage – cast a vote. Never before had Scotland been so engaged in a political question. 

And today they would answer that question with a simple Yes or No.

Outside polling stations, there was something of a carnival atmosphere. 

Yes activists turned up wearing kilts amidst the stirring skirl of bagpipes.

The trend of taking pet dogs wearing campaign rosettes was in evidence, with many photos of the pooches appearing on social media minutes later.

The atmosphere, though tense, was friendly, with rival campaign members sharing jokes and gossip – and the occasional barb.

But in Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, No campaigners returning from door-knocking sessions had a depressing tale to tell. 

If what was happening in the city, particularly on the council housing estates, was happening elsewhere in the country, the pro-UK side was in trouble.

The pattern was clear and had been revealed in canvass returns over the last year or so: voters, particularly Labour voters living in areas like Castlemilk, Easterhouse and Drumchapel, had initially been recorded as supporting the Union.

But as the campaign had dragged on, a significant number of those votes had switched from No to ‘Don’t know’ – always a warning sign in any campaign.

Now, on polling day, as canvassers returned to local committee rooms to report on the success (or otherwise) of their efforts in getting people out to the polls, that trend was being confirmed. 

A lot of those ‘Don’t knows’ were now being identified as ‘Yes’. The only possible response this late in the day was to wait and see. There wasn’t long to wait.

As the polls closed at 10pm, excited Yes activists and their nervous counterparts from the No campaign gathered in counts, waiting for the opening of the black, metal boxes that would reveal the fate not only of Scotland but of the entire United Kingdom. 

The First Minister was in his Gordon parliamentary constituency in Scotland’s north east, expecting to make his first public comments on his historic triumph at the Aberdeen Exhibition

Centre, where Aberdeenshire’s votes were being counted.

And then, at 10.30pm precisely, YouGov made its prediction of the final result: No: 54 per cent, Yes: 46. Still, polls had been wrong before, and Nationalists saw no reason to believe the accuracy of this one.

In Downing Street, David Cameron and his closest colleague, the Chancellor, George Osborne, settled down to watch the results, fortified by a carry-out curry dinner and surrounded by aides who had been ordered to stay for as long as was necessary.

If Yes won, their job would be to write Cameron’s resignation speech which he would deliver in the early hours of the next day.

And then the first result was announced. And in a heartbeat, the Yes campaigners’ hopes were dashed. Clackmannanshire was seen as a key battleground for the Nationalists, one they needed to win if they hoped to gain a majority in the rest of the country.

But as the figures were read out by the rolling news presenters, the shock was almost palpable. Clackmannanshire had voted No by a margin of nearly eight points.

Wiser heads among the SNP’s veteran election organisers knew immediately that the game was up.

As the trickle of results turned into a steady flow, it became clear that Salmond’s gambit had failed.

In the halls and arenas where votes were being counted and placed in bundles, there was an eerie calm. TV cameras and press photographers captured the heartbreak of young Yes activists as they comforted each other.

The tears were real because the dream was over.

Meanwhile, No campaigners were mostly careful to avoid gestures of triumphalism, an effort undoubtedly helped by the fact that Scotland’s biggest city had voted Yes, as had Dundee, Clydebank and Dumbarton.

This was of small consolation to the assembled Yes campaigners in the second city of the Empire.

Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, a Glasgow MSP, decided to make a personal appearance at the city’s count, where she was greeted with a frantic roar from her supporters – an early sign that the SNP had every intention of capitalising politically even on such a momentous defeat.

In Aberdeen, however, her boss, Alex Salmond, had decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

Realising that he was about to be roundly defeated, the First Minister chose to board a plane to Edinburgh rather than submit himself to media scrutiny by following through on his plans to appear at the Aberdeen count.

He had hoped to evade any contact with the press at all, but enterprising photographer Derek Ironside managed to snap his getaway in an official Scottish Government car, the image becoming the defining one of referendum night: scowling, clearly depressed as he dolefully examined the news on his iPad.

A leader scurrying away from the scene of defeat, his deputy cheered to the rafters in one of the few cities that had recorded a Yes victory. The scene was already being set for the explosive aftermath to this political drama.

Beyond the machinations within the SNP, a new dawn had broken over Scotland.

The people had spoken and they had said No. The United Kingdom was saved by the ballot box. Scotland was still British.

But despite this decisive victory, David Cameron just couldn’t help himself.

The Old Etonian, having conceded so much to the wily fox Salmond at the start of the campaign, might have been expected to affect the grace and magnanimity that his alma mater drilled into its students.

The Union had been saved, but at a cost of division and bitterness. The Prime Minister could have started the vital process of healing.

He could have embraced Scotland as part of the UK family of nations. Instead, as he made his first comments on the referendum result on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in the early hours of Friday morning, he chose to open up new wounds and new battlegrounds.

Now that Scotland’s constitutional future was settled, it was time to address the unfairness of Scottish MPs’ right to vote on devolved matters in the House of Commons. It was time for English votes for English laws (EVEL).

No campaigners and supporters couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They had worked hard to win Cameron’s referendum, had sacrificed family time and free time to win the arguments in favour of continuing the Union.

Yet here was the Prime Minister using this moment to open up another can of constitutional worms. With the Nationalists still licking their wounds and

facing an existential moment, their dream of independence wounded, if not dead, Cameron was offering them a lifeline.

Their warnings to Labour and the Liberal Democrats about getting into bed with the Tories had been right after all. Like the scorpion on the back of the frog, they just couldn’t help themselves.

‘See? We told you so.’

It was the worst possible ending to a hard-fought and well-won campaign. And it only presaged more drama to come.

Just a few hours later, the man who had led Scotland for the last seven years, who had seen his personal ambition thwarted at the very last minute by that same nation, addressed a press conference in a radically different mood from the one he had anticipated just 12 hours earlier. 

But the resignation of Scotland’s longest serving First Minister was not witnessed by all representatives of the media.

Fed-up and frustrated with the coverage the Yes campaign and Salmond himself had received from some outlets, and inadvertently confirming the authoritarian nature of those who would seek to wrench Scotland out of the UK, journalists working for the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express were refused entry to Bute House.

The excuse offered was that there was ‘not enough room’. Offended by this clear attack on press freedom, the Guardian reporter chose not to enter either.

It was an ignominious but strangely appropriate end to Salmond’s Holyrood career. Inside, he confirmed he would resign as SNP leader and First Minister.

‘For me as leader, my time is nearly over. 

But for Scotland, the campaign continues and the dream shall never die.’

‘The campaign continues’: so much for the Edinburgh Agreement, which committed all signatories to accepting the referendum result.

If most No campaigners felt that triumphalism would be out of place the day after polling, that message didn’t reach some members of the Unionist community.

On the same day that Salmond resigned, hundreds of people gathered in Glasgow’s George Square to celebrate the previous day’s result, some wearing

Orange Lodge regalia, others flying Union flags and waving No Thanks banners.

A small crowd of Yes supporters had also gathered. The rival mobs were forcefully separated by the police and as the Unionists grew in number, the Yessers left the scene, leaving the police to manage the crowd and prevent it leaving the George Square area.

Witnesses described the scene as intimidating. Six arrests were made. It was an ugly end to what had been, in general, a peaceful campaign.

As Nicola Sturgeon prepared to be anointed as Salmond’s replacement, the opinion polls started to deliver some very bad news for Scottish Labour.

As Scotland settled down after the tumult of the referendum campaign, and voters started to focus on the next electoral fight, those who had voted Yes and been disappointed – including many Labour voters – started to move decisively into the SNP column.

Labour’s problems were further compounded by an unseemly fight between Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont and the party’s London headquarters, ending in her resignation and her explosive description of Scottish Labour as a ‘branch office’ of the national party.

True or not, it chimed with the narrative being pushed by the SNP and helped seal the fate of her party for nearly a decade.

Jim Murphy’s emergence as Lamont’s replacement did nothing to revive Scottish Labour’s fortunes.

When the general election arrived on May 7, 2015, it lost 40 of its 41 seats, with the SNP winning all but three of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies.

One year after the referendum, the Yes movement held a rally in Glasgow demanding ‘Indyref2’. 

Nine months later, they thought they might achieve exactly that when Britain voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, with Scotland voting to Remain by 62 to 38 per cent.

In response, First Minister Sturgeon immediately put a second independence referendum back on the table. 

Yet over the next few years, a succession of British Prime Ministers – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer – firmly declined to agree to such a vote.

Eventually, as she was always going to have to do, Sturgeon sought a final, authoritative ruling from the UK Supreme Court on whether Holyrood could run a referendum without UK approval.

The answer, delivered in November 2022, was unanimous: no, it could not.

With her options running out, with her party already badly fractured over the rift between her and her predecessor (Salmond had been acquitted on charges of sexual offences and relations between the two had disintegrated in the aftermath of the case), with her hopes of introducing controversial reforms to gender self-identification in Scotland dashed by the UK Government, and facing a police investigation into SNP finances, Sturgeon announced her own resignation as First Minister and SNP leader on February 15, 2023. 

She was succeeded by Humza Yousaf the following month.

He lasted barely a year before he was forced to resign after he unilaterally ended the parliamentary agreement with the Scottish Greens, immediately losing his party’s majority at Holyrood.

Yousaf was subsequently replaced by John Swinney. But that change was not enough to prevent the loss of all but nine SNP MPs at the 2024 general election, mostly at the hands of a resurgent Labour Party – another major setback to the independence cause.

At which point we must take a deep breath.

The shadow of the referendum is a long one. Its repercussions will be felt for some time to come and it will continue to define Scottish politics, perhaps for a generation.

It has ended the careers of many politicians and launched the careers of many more.

It triggered a significant transfer of powers from Westminster to Holyrood, some of which still haven’t been used.

But its core purpose cannot be hidden or disguised. Whatever its impact on the wider political world, the 2014 Scottish independence referendum gave Scots an opportunity to reject separatism.

They took it.