I got an email from David Cameron today.

The email asked me to phone random strangers in Scotland to ask them to vote to stay in the union.

Phoning in dependence

The message is couched in urgent and passionate terms.
‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together – and if you do too, please do everything you can to help save our great country,’ he says.

So pick up the phone and ask Scotland to stay. That was his message.

No, really, that was the message.

In other words, plead.

Pleading always works when a relationship is on the verge of breaking up.

The Conservatives have apparently arranged some kind of phone bank to put you in touch with your own random Scottish person. You just have to log in, sign up, and bell away!

Phoning strangers in Scotland and asking them to stay in the union is an excellent idea if you want Scotland to become independent. It is a very bad idea if you want the union to persist.

The people of Scotland are considering going it alone partly because England, and more specifically the affluent south, has for generations been trying to tell Scotland what to do.

Imagine how perfectly innocent Scottish people are going to react if they suddenly receive calls in the privacy of their own home just when they are settling down to an evening of telly after a hard day’s work and suddenly on the phone they’ve got the cream of the shires pleading with them to vote no on Thursday.

‘Hello, may I speak to a random Scottish person, please?’

‘That’ll be me.’

‘I’m calling from the affluent home counties to plead with you to stay part of the union. David Cameron asked me and he said in an email he sent this very morning that he desperately wants our family of nations to stay together.’

‘David Cameron, you say? That privileged, cosseted, Tory numpty? That representative of the class of Tory numpties that has been trying to rule Scotland by remote control since the Union of the Crowns in 1603?’

‘Yes, that’s the chap. Do you know him? Terribly nice fellow and very dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich and English. So, are you going to vote no, then?’

People with an actual memory might like to recall The Guardian’s 2004 campaign to persuade the undecided voters of Clark County, Ohio, not to vote for President Bush. The result was a swing to Bush and a near invasion of Britain.

The result of Cameron’s call-a-random-Scot campaign will be queues of voters camping outside the voting centres from this very minute so they can be the first to vote yes on Thursday.

Good luck with that, Mr Cameron, and will that be the high road or the low road you’ll be taking out of Scotland then?