To see Nicola Sturgeon so uncomfortable on the idea a Vote to leave the UK could be subject to a second, confirmatory referendum is fascinating for me. Quick thread. 1/

In the second half of 2013 in the Better Together campaign we spent *a lot* of time scenario planning ahead of the SNP Government publishing their White Paper. They needed a transformative moment in the campaign and we tried to imagine what that might be so we could prepare. 2/

Our voter research in summer 2013 suggested that, of the one third of voters who were undecided, two thirds of them would vote to leave the UK if they could be certain it would make us no worse off. In our strategic understanding of the contest, this was the SNP’s key weakness 3/

So we hypothethised that, in order to shift the debate, the SNP government might offer a second, confirmatory vote on the terms of leaving the UK they were able to agree in the (ridiculously optimistic) 18 months they’d set aside for negotiations. 4/

In the huge amount of work we did (we even wrote our own version of the White Paper which was better than the real thing) this was the only ‘what if’ we came up with that we thought could give them a chance of winning. 5/

We didn’t talk about this possibility with the core campaign team because we were genuinely worried about it. But we didn’t think it would result in ultimate defeat because we knew the terms of leaving the UK would always mean huge pain & so victory in that confirmatory vote. 6/

We viewed it as a way to say to the electorate ‘we’re so confident there will be a currency union, there won’t be cuts, and there won’t be job losses, etc that we’ll give you a chance to change your mind.’ Like a money-back guarantee when you buy something. 7/

So given that wee bit of background, it’s interesting to see that the FM has come to the same conclusion we did: she might win a referendum making promises about the economic impact of leaving the UK, but she wouldn’t win a second one when the true cost came to light. 8/

And it seems her internal critics, who said that her commitment to a confirmatory vote on Brexit risked setting a precedent that could not be refused for Scexit, might have been on to something. 9/9