Alex Massie Alex Massie

With malice toward none and with charity towards all, now the real work begins

Relief, actually. Not joy. A battle won is better than a battle lost but still an exhausting, bloody, business. There is no need to bayonet the wounded. It would, in any case, be grotesque to do so. Scotland voted and made, in my view, the right choice. The prudent choice. The bigger-hearted choice.

But 45 per cent of my countrymen disagree. That’s something to be respected too. Moreover a good number of No voters did so reluctantly and not because they were necessarily persuaded by the case for Union but because they felt the Yes campaign had not proved its own argument beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s an important qualification. A reminder that the Union is a contract and support for it remains provisional.

To put it another way, a 55-45 victory is both a handsome margin – wider than the 53-47 I had guessed – and a remarkable repudiation of the Union. It is clear enough to be decisive; close enough to demand modesty in victory. At 9pm yesterday the air was thick with nationalist expectation and Unionist anxiety. All day we’d heard stories of friends and relatives and friends of friends making last-minute conversions to Yes. Plenty of Unionists, if they are honest with their recollections, will admit to thinking, then, that the cause was lost.

That’s the danger of anecdote, of course. We extrapolate from our own experiences and think what we hear is likely to be more typical than actually proves the case. Even so, there was every reason to be concerned; every reason to wonder if Scots might say to hell with it all and leap into the unknown.

In the end we peered over the edge and thought, jings, that’s a long way down. Clackmannan hammered Yes and Inverclyde killed them.

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