Alex Salmond: David Cameron was 's****ing himself' over indyref and phoned Putin for help
Alex Salmond has claimed David Cameron was “s****ing himself” in the dying days of the IndyRef campaign - and phoned up Vladimir Putin for help. The former first minister, who led the Yes campaign a decade ago, told the Daily Record the ex-Tory PM was frantically ringing world leaders including Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Kremlin boss Putin to get them to speak out against indy.
Ultimately, the Yes campaign was defeated as Scots voted No to independence by 55 per cent to 45 per cent on September 18, 2014. Salmond spoke to the Daily Record ahead of a Yes rally on Saturday in Glasgow to mark the tenth anniversary of the historic vote.
Revealing the desperate measures taken by then PM Cameron in the last days of the campaign, Salmond told the Record: “Let’s just use a direct phrase - the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was s****ing himself in the last ten days of the campaign.
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“He was phoning up world leaders. He phoned up Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, the guy in Australia, Vladimir Putin in order to get them mobilised to try and say something about this, about Scotland.
“Very few people answered them, incidentally… Obama made a very lukewarm statement. So that’s how worried the No campaign were.
“But you’ve got to accept that when you get an establishment regrouping in that last week of the campaign, that has an effect. And again, they had a few more guns to fire than we did at that stage.”
In early 2014, a Russian news agency reported claims Cameron had sought Putin’s support to publicly oppose Scottish independence.
The Russian president then issued comments saying the question was a “domestic matter” but that there were “some advantages” to being a bigger state. Putin has gone on to become an international pariah following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
In a rare joint interview alongside former socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan, who will also speak at the Saturday rally in George Square, Salmond said the Westminster establishment “regrouped” in the final days of the campaign to defeat his indy bid.
Quizzed on whether he had done enough to persuade wavering Scots on issues like currency and pensions, Salmond insisted he doesn’t “beat himself up” on those questions - and instead feels voting Yes was “just a bridge too far” for the country ten years ago.
But he admitted he believes in the last week of the campaign, the Yes camp made a mistake by focusing too much on its own supporters rather than on swaying swithering voters. In a wide-ranging interview with the Record, Salmond also defended his stance on key issues like the pound in 2014 - where he had proposed a currency union with the rest of the UK.
He famously struggled to defend the policy against the late Alistair Darling, Better Together campaign chief, in the first televised debate of the campaign in August 2014. Salmond accepted he had been defeated but added he subsequently won the second debate against Darling, which aired on the BBC later that month.
He said: “In the second debate, Alistair got his answer on the currency, and as the crowd in that hall in Glasgow made it clear, he didn’t have the answers on the economy.”
Instead, he said the historic “Vow” made by Cameron, then-Labour leader Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems - and first revealed by the Record - had been “heavily influential” in deciding the referendum outcome.
Salmond added: “If the Yes campaign made one mistake, then I think in the final days we probably concentrated too much on the mobilisation of our own supporters…
“We believed we could get the turnout from the Yes areas up to really good levels. And we did, of course, we achieved that spectacularly.
“But also, because of the shock news to people who were inclined No, from more prosperous parts of Scotland, perhaps, the more Tory inclined people - they also saw that message and were worried about a Yes vote. So they turned out in even larger numbers.”
Salmond insisted while no political campaign is “absolutely perfect” he believes Yes “got the big calls right”. But he confessed to the Record: “I thought we were going to win the campaign. I mean, when we started out, everybody said you got no chance, it’s a long shot.
“But I’ve backed enough horses to know that long shots can come in - and I thought, as the campaign gained momentum, we were within touching distance of a historic victory. And my only regret is looking back at how much better Scotland would be now if we’d seized that opportunity.”
In bullish fashion, Salmond declared he has “no doubt” Scotland will be independent in ten years - highlighting how polls show around half of Scots support a breakaway. However, he suggested his successors, like Nicola Sturgeon, had squandered opportunities to advance the indy cause.
The Alba Party chief said: “If you lose the reputation for competence, as unfortunately the SNP has done, then it’s more difficult to persuade people… they have to get some adults back in the Scottish Parliament.
“You’ve got to get people who can run things, who know the difference between self-determination and self-identification, who know what matters to ordinary Scots.” But he added: “Scotland will be independent in ten years, I’ve got no doubt about that.”
He spoke to the Record alongside veteran left-winger Sheridan as the pair prepare to appear together at a Hope Over Fear pro-indy rally in Glasgow tomorrow to mark the ten-year anniversary of the IndyRef
Sheridan, who was an MSP between 1999 and 2007, first for the Scottish Socialist Party then Solidarity, said the SNP had failed to provide a “focal point” to rally the grassroots indy movement in recent years.
Despite both being divisive figures who fell out with then splintered off from their former parties, both men claimed they want to see a united pro-independence ticket in the 2026 Holyrood election to advance the constitutional cause.
Sheridan said: “When there is no focus, then people tend to look internally and contemplate their navels and everything that was small becomes huge. So we fall out with people over minuscule issues. As soon as there is a focus, then we can bring people back.”
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