David Cameron passionately backed a No vote, but knew that any speech from him would be counter-productive. So what did he do? He went to Scotland and gave a big speech making exactly this point. He went on television, and begged the Scots not to make him a factor in their decision. He stood underneath a bank of stage lighting and said, ‘Pay no heed to me’.
When he said, ‘Don’t vote Yes just because you hate me,’ what kind of self-respecting Tory-hater would have been swayed? His fear was that they might have forgotten to ignore him if he hadn’t reminded them to.
I blame whichever idiot was the first person to say ‘no comment’. Until then, if a newsworthy person didn’t say anything, the press would report that the interesting party ‘made no comment’. But since people idiotically started saying the words ‘no comment’ out loud (which is a comment, of course), silence is no longer considered an option.
If you want to say nothing, say nothing. If you say stand behind a lectern, clear your throat and say, ‘I have nothing to say at this point,’ you have wasted everyone’s time. And it’ll be your fault if reporters chase you down the road saying at three-second intervals, ‘How about at this point? And what about now?’
There’s a dreadful self-importance about saying ‘no comment’, as if the world couldn’t possibly cope with your actual silence, as if the uncertainty would kill them. Instead you must reassure them that, although you have nothing to say, you’re still there with them. This is how to deal with an upset child, not the public.
David Cameron clearly understands that the Scots hate him with a righteous passion, as he showed when he called his party ‘the fucking T****s’. So who on earth did he think he was speaking to? Surely in Scotland you can’t be sympathetic to the Tories unless you actually are one. At the 2010 general election, the Tories were down to 16.7 per cent in Scotland. This is the so-called ‘hard vote’, the rump of people who will always vote for a given party - the opposite of a swing voter. These are the only people in Scotland who would give David Cameron a positive hearing - and what is the chance that they did not already agree with him? Cameron’s only possible audience is Scottish Tories who were planning on voting Yes - and the few hundred die-hard eccentrics who answer that description probably don’t own a television.
In his early days as prime minister, Cameron was notable for letting national events go past - a plot development in a soap opera, or perhaps an interesting result in a sports fixture - without giving it a prime ministerial response. He still manages it now, but back in 2010 it was a real novelty.
It all started with Blair, as so much of modern political communication does. Blair’s presidential style meant that he saw himself less as the democratically elected head of the UK government, and more as the lead character in the national soap opera. When the Dagmar burnt down, Dot Cotton would have had something to say about it, even though it wasn’t her storyline. Similarly, it felt totally normal for Tony Blair to talk about anything in the national conversation. He was just a regular kind of guy, as he never tired of telling us.
Then Gordon Brown took over and, naturally, continued to govern in the same style as Blair, on account of their extraordinarily similar personalities. Brown communicated with the country according to the habits of the Blair years, because everyone had forgotten that there was any other way of doing it. Brown led the tributes to Jade Goody, he publicly congratulated racing drivers on winning driving races, and he told off radio presenters for sleeping with the granddaughter of a Fawlty Towers actor. It was all the kind of thing Blair could have done with ease, but Brown looked uncomfortable.
To be fair, Brown looked pretty uncomfortable doing anything apart from reading out the Budget on Budget Day - and he never looked blissfully happy even doing that. But when Cameron arrived, he managed to let several major events pass without the country knowing what Downing Street thought. In the second half of 2010, Tomasz Shafernaker accidentally gave the finger to BBC Weather-viewers, Nigel Havers walked out of I’m a Celebrity, and Emma Watson had a haircut - and the country never heard the First Lord of the Treasury’s take on it all. The nation, you will recall, felt rudderless.
But, although Cameron brought a welcome prime ministerial silence to the world of celebrity trivia, he has yet to learn how valuable the same tactic can be in politics. Of course, he would have been criticised if he had kept 400 miles from the independence campaign, but there were lines he could have used to shut that criticism down.
He could have played the high-minded democrat: ‘I don’t have a vote, so I shan’t be in the campaign.’ The No campaign had its leaders and its spokespeople, and David Cameron wasn’t one of them. His respect for the No campaign could have been his public answer for staying away - his desire not to boost the Yes campaign could have been a jokey subtext for Westminster-watchers to enjoy. Basically, Cameron could easily have spent the last month impersonating the Queen.
Or he could have played the ‘far too busy’ card, and just hoped that something time-consuming happened in England or Wales - or, even better, on the world stage. It might have been a risky strategy, and if things went a bit quiet you might have to ring up Morocco and persuade them to invade Gibraltar. But, thanks to Isis and Putin, that wouldn’t have been necessary. There has been easily enough on the prime ministerial plate to keep him locked in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, emerging only to narrow his eyes to the cameras and say ‘Cobra’.
He was so close. In the weeks and months running up to the referendum Cameron, along with the rest of England, did an excellent job of entirely ignoring the independence debate. With extraordinary self-control, we non-Scots followed our leader’s example and gave not a moment’s thought to anything that happened up there in the weeks and months - probably the years and decades - running up to yesterday. It may have looked like neglect, but it was in fact the profoundest respect.
He kept quiet before the speech, and he certainly kept it buttoned until polling day - you can only imagine what the No campaign must have threatened him with to buy his silence. Something rather more Gordon Brown-ish than Alistair Darling-ish, in political bruising terms.
You can point to Cameron’s speech in Aberdeen on Monday of polling week as one of the moments the Yes campaign started to look like a contender. This makes Cameron the chief villain for every kind of British unionist. Many already blame him for letting Salmond get his way in important aspects of the referendum, not least in allowing the wording on the ballot to give the pro-independence answer the feelgood advantage of being a Yes.
Cameron’s tactical mistakes and toxic unpopularity have brought him uncomfortably close to defeat. There are many things a politician doesn’t want to be: a loser, a tactical dunce and electoral poison are all pretty high up the list. And to avoid it hew only had to say the simplest thing: nothing.
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