Danny Alexander on Scottish independence, income tax, Nick Clegg and George Osborne

Danny Alexander doesn’t suntan well, but he looks more freckly than normal when we meet in HM Treasury. He’s just back from the seaside town of Nairn in the Highlands, where, as the most senior Scot in the Cabinet, he’s been sent to fight in the front line of the Battle for Britain. People were queuing to sign up to the Better Together campaign, he says, and he has high hopes of defeating Alex Salmond on 18 September. It all added up to something rather rare for a Liberal Democrat: the feeling of being on the winning side in an election.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he has been trusted with making various economic arguments for the union. If the Scottish National Party has been tugging heart-strings, the unionists have been tugging purse-strings — hoping that the latter mean more to Scots. They’ll be £1,400 better off a year, he says, if they vote ‘no’. I ask if his colleagues in the Treasury went a bit too far when they seemed to feel the need to translate this figure into Scottish, saying it meant ‘a meal of fish and chips with your family every day for around ten weeks’.

‘I think people ought to be able to see its funny side. If all these po-faced nationalists get in charge there will never be another joke told in Scotland under independence.’ But as a Highlander, didn’t he feel the urge to explain to the civil servants who wrote the chips analogy that Rab C. Nesbitt was not a documentary? ‘It is something that is aimed at a particular audience — that obviously other people didn’t like,’ he concedes. ‘I understand that, and perhaps some of it could have been better-judged.’ But it was, he says, a blip in a campaign that is heading for overall success.