FORMER first minister Alex Salmond has claimed David Cameron was “s******g” himself towards the end of the 2014 independence referendum.
The former SNP leader led the Yes campaign and told the Daily Record that Cameron was phoning world leaders, including Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in a bid to get them to speak out against Scottish independence.
It comes ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the vote on Scottish independence, which will take place on September 18.
Salmond told the Record: “Let’s just use a direct phrase – the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was “s******g” himself in the last 10 days of the campaign.
“He was phoning up world leaders. He phoned up Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, the guy in Australia, Vladimir Putin in order to get them mobilised to try and say something about this, about Scotland.
“Very few people answered them, incidentally … Obama made a very lukewarm statement. So that’s how worried the No campaign were.
“But you’ve got to accept that when you get an establishment regrouping in that last week of the campaign, that has an effect.
“And again, they had a few more guns to fire than we did at that stage.”
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser took to Twitter/X to declare Salmond’s comments as “utter nonsense” and that the “sole source” for them was “Russian propagandists”.
In early 2014, a Russian news agency reported claims Cameron had sought Putin's support to oppose independence with the Russian president saying the question was a "domestic matter" but that there were "some advantages" to being a bigger state.
It comes as Salmond and former MSP Tommy Sheridan prepare to appear at a pro-independence rally in Glasgow on Saturday.
The Alba leader did admit that he felt the Yes campaign made an error in focusing too much on its own supporters rather than on swaying undecided voters, but that he doesn’t “beat himself up” on issues like currency and pensions.
‘I’d have stayed on’
Salmond also appears in a new documentary by ITV Border about the 10th anniversary of the referendum – A Decade of Debate.
He said he would not have left his role as first minister if he had known how the next 10 years would play out.
"I thought to make a point of departure for the referendum in the future was a right thing for the national movement. Looking back, that was a mistake,” he said.
“Now, in retrospect, that was a daft thing to do. But then … I thought we were set for independence in a reasonable timescale.”
He added: “If you’d told me then that 10 years later, we’d still be waiting despite the manifest opportunities there have been, then I would have said, ‘well, I’ll just hang about then and see the matter through.”
However, Sturgeon (above) questioned if that would be the case.
“So clearly he’s going to think that he could have done things so much better. I say that in as gentle a way as possible, to coin one of his favourite phrases,” she told the documentary.
Sturgeon also spoke of how she was unsure if she wanted to step into Salmond’s shoes when he decided to stand down.
“It was more a sense of I don’t want just to sort of almost by default say, ‘yes I’m going to put myself forward.’ I wanted to take a moment to ask myself some hard questions,” she said.
“Not just ‘did I really want it’ but ‘did I actually really think I was capable of it?’. It was a sense of needing take a step back and reflect, which I did, and we know what happened after that.”
The documentary will be broadcast on ITV Border Scotland at 8.30pm on Thursday.
