No campaign worry Gordon Brown’s gone rogue

That is what some people in the no camp are left wondering this morning. The speech Gordon Brown gave in Westminster yesterday he then placed in the Guardian . It attacked almost every single seminal moment in the Better Together campaign so far as ill-judged, counter productive and capable of contributing to a yes victory.

“Countries can be lost by mistake and if people come up to Scotland and say ‘Britain says no to Scotland having a share in the currency, Britain says you are not going to have defence jobs’, or ‘Britain says you are going to go bankrupt’, or as last week ‘Britain says if you vote for independence you will lose your fish and chips and your pies and your holidays in Torremolinos’ in a patronising way that ought to be withdrawn immediately, it is obvious the issue will become Scotland vs Britain and people will say the debate is ‘Do you stand up for Scotland or Britain?’”

He did it on the day that Alistair Darling in Glasgow was leading one of the main moments in the no campaign – the launch of the “no thanks” logo and the joint promise of more devolution from the three main Westminster parties. Yes campaigners couldn’t believe their eyes as they saw quotations from his off-camera speech yesterday matching their own critique of the no campaign in almost every particular.

And there is no reason to think he has got it all off his chest. Tonight he gave a speech to the LSE on Scotland – the former PM is not known for refreshing his material so the Guardian article/Westminster speech can be assumed to be the central text. He is launching a book this month on Scotland and Britain and there will probably be matching analysis of the no campaign’s performance thus far in that. On Thursday he speaks under the Better Together banner in St Andrew’s.

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