As Scotland approached the first referendum on independence in 2014 a grand nationalist delusion began to emerge which many of its adherents were happy to indulge. It assumed that there was a significant cohort of No supporters who, if only a sound economic case could be made for independence, would be happy to migrate to Yes.

This idea was sustained in the years immediately following the referendum. It rested on a greater delusion bordering on arrogance: that no reasonable person truly identifying as Scottish could really want to belong to the Union and especially not if it was being administered by a Conservative Government at Westminster.

As the referendum campaign entered its final weeks I travelled extensively throughout Scotland and began to sense a dynamic in our towns and villages that seemed to have been overlooked by Yes strategists. As the opinion polls crept up from a starting point of around 27% in favour of Yes and moved into the high 30s and mid-40s, the inconvenience was easily buried.

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The truth that dare not speak its name in ardent Yes society was this: that a large percentage of Scots were quite happy to belong to the Union and harboured deep feelings of affection about England and the English. What’s more: they considered themselves to be as fiercely proud of their Scottishness as the most fervent nationalist. This simply didn’t compute at Yes HQ.

What if people just liked the Union for its own sake and for what it seemed to represent to them: peace, stability, permanence, yet still permitting badinage and nationalistic tomfoolery around the big sporting occasions? It was unlikely, given the intensity of the emotional excursions and alarums around September, 2014, that these people would be out and proud about this.

Alex Salmond seemed to........

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