Dave and a VERY breakfast with the Queen

A Balmoral showdown and how the Scottish crisis left the PM terrified and humbled

THE ATMOSPHERE over breakfast was strained as the Queen noted the headline splashed across a newspaper: ‘Yes vote leads in Scots poll.’ For the first time in his political career, David Cameron’s equilibrium deserted him. It was Sunday morning, just 11 days before the Scottish referendum on independence, and he was staying at Balmoral for his annual late summer weekend with the Queen.

What if the YouGov poll was right? How would he be able to tell Her Majesty that he’d managed to go one further than Lord North, who lost the North American colonies, and lost the United Kingdom itself? The enormity of it all simply overwhelmed Cameron.

‘One of his normal characteristics is the ability to stay completely calm when everyone is panicking. This is one of the few times he didn’t do that,’ says a friend. As he left Balmoral that night, Cameron telephoned his pollster, Andrew Cooper, from his car. ‘He was very worried,’ Cooper admits. ‘It was the first time he was seriously contemplating: “S***, we might lose.” ’

The Queen, too, was deeply troubled, and Cameron knew it.

Inside Whitehall, there were discussions on whether she could somehow speak out against Scottish independence while remaining within the constitutional boundaries of neutrality.

Under a cloak of secrecy, the Cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, held talks to work out how she might express her concerns in a suitably coded way.

The result was a remark overheard after a Sunday service in Crathie Kirk, the small church that the Royals attend when staying at Balmoral. ‘I hope people will think very carefully about the future,’ the Queen was reported to have said — to the delight of the No camp.

The carefully chosen words were no accident. Her supposedly offthe- cuff remark was a deliberate last-minute intervention — and it left no one in any doubt about which side she was on.

Cameron was undoubtedly deeply grateful. In the final countdown to the big day, his usual sangfroid had deserted him and he’d started having sleepless nights. And he wasn’t the only one suffering.

As stress levels mounted in the Cameron household, Samantha confided to friends that her hair was falling out.

Her husband was by then fully aware that if Scotland broke away, the removal vans would soon be trundling up Downing Street. Worse, he’d go down in history as the Prime Minister who presided over the break-up of Britain.

One of his confidants says: ‘Funnily enough, I think it was less “We’re going to have to move out” than the fact that, for the rest of his life, he’d be the Prime Minister who lost the United Kingdom. He was saying: “I’ll be remembered for this till the day I die.” ’ In the days leading up to the referendum, Cameron became so agitated that he gathered his team to make contingency plans in the event of a Yes vote.

The implications were so overwhelming they didn’t know where to begin. ‘They tried to draft a strategy for what they’d do, what they’d say the morning after the vote, who’d come out and give a statement,’ says a source. ‘They got about three paragraphs in, and it was not clear it would work.’

So how did the Tory leader come so close to presiding over the breakup of the United Kingdom, and to what extent was it his fault?

Cameron has always had a deep affection for Scotland — though his Scotland is one of hunting lodges and grouse moors. He knew the Scots didn’t warm to his ‘posh’ English accent and education.

It was for this reason that he agreed not to play a starring role in the No campaign.

The cross-party Better Together group was formed in spring 2012. Among its members were ex- Chancellor Alistair Darling, former International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander and Cameron’s pollster, Andrew Cooper.

But there were simmering tensions from the start, which developed into constant rivalry and infighting. Nor did it help that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown — who harboured a bitter grudge against Alistair Darling — was often bad-tempered and unco-operative.

There was one particularly exasperating telephone exchange between campaign director Blair McDougall — a Labour activist — and Gordon Brown.

While they were still speaking, McDougall scrawled the word ‘loon’ on a piece of paper and held it aloft for his colleagues to see. They struggled to hide their mirth.

For months, Cameron was content to leave everything to the Better Together team. But it was steeped in complacency — and, at times, could barely hold itself together, never mind protect the Union.

DARLING, who privately admitted that he had never run a big campaign before and didn’t know what he was doing, was persistently undermined by both Brown and an increasingly frustrated Douglas Alexander.

No one seemed to have a clue what

they wanted on campaign billboards. The first agency the team hired — without a proper pitch or brief — produced tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of adverts that were never used.

The second company, picked primarily because it was Scottish, created an advert based on the acclaimed American TV series Breaking Bad (about a chemistry teacher who launches a new career cooking methamphetamine — the destructive drug also called crystal meth).

Not only was this a copyright infringement, but it bombed with focus groups: people either didn’t get it or thought it was snide English insinuation that Scotland had a drugs problem. Another proposed advert showed a tiny figure at the edge of a giant cliff. It was junked for being in bad taste after insiders pointed out that it looked like someone about to jump off Beachy Head.

Meanwhile, Bank of England governor Mark Carney was privately beginning to worry there would be a run on the banks if Scotland went its own Cordial but distant: An audience with the Queen at Balmoral way. Insiders say that, although he was careful not to show it, he was frustrated by Cameron’s low-key approach and felt he could be more proactive.

Slowly, however, the Prime Minister started waking up to the potential for catastrophe. What followed was a co- ordinated attempt by the Treasury and the Bank of England to ramp up the economic risks of an independent Scotland by ruling out a currency union.

This was arguably the single biggest Westminster intervention of the whole campaign.

To Cameron’s critics, Scotland is the ultimate example of ‘essay-crisis’ leadership (like a student who leaves his work until the night before): a last- minute victory secured only when Downing Street panicked and started making desperate promises for ever more ‘devo max’ (maximum devolution of powers).

But it’s easier to accuse Cameron of complacency than to find any concrete evidence for it.

‘ David was very active in ensuring that the Government side of the campaign delivered what was needed,’ says Cooper. ‘At any point where somebody asked him to put a call in to X,Y,Z, he just did it . . .

‘I don’t think it’s fair to fault him, given how incredibly weak the stock of the Tories in Scotland is. It was very disciplined of him to acknowledge that — to be willing to be guided.

‘He deferred to the advice of the Scots, he deferred to the people on the campaign and he deferred to the Labour people. He did exactly what he was advised to do when he was advised to do it.’

Nevertheless, in the final three weeks of the campaign, Better Together descended into panic.

Until then, Brown had been aloof — contenting himself, in the words of one insider, with ‘just throwing grenades at the campaign’. He was never seen in the Better Together offices and refused to work with Tories.

‘He’d just sit on his own and come up with his ideas without any consultation,’ one senior member of the No team recalls. ‘The man was just awful.’

In the final fortnight, however, Brown threw himself into the campaign, delivering a series of barnstorming speeches across Scotland. His final speech, the day before the vote, ‘was just the most powerful 15-minute speech I’ve ever heard in my life’, says a Tory member of the No team.

As old divisions healed, Brown even started working closely with Cameron. Indeed, after the Prime Minister’s depressing weekend at Balmoral, the two men actually spoke on the phone to each other every day. Cameron’s final speech was even sent to Brown for approval.

According to a No 10 insider, the Prime Minister had to bite his tongue as his predecessor lectured him on how he should have run the campaign.

‘Gordon Brown couldn’t resist saying: “I’m the saviour of the world, and you take my advice,” ’ the source revealed.

Cameron’s view, he says, was indulgent. ‘ That’s Gordon,’ said the Prime Minister, wisely refusing to rise to the bait.