IN 2012, BBC Scotland’s former head of news Blair Jenkins received a phone call while he was in America.
He was being asked if he’d like to appear at a Cineworld in Edinburgh, alongside the first minister, a clutch of actors and creatives for the launch of a new organisation called Yes Scotland.
Jenkins, who says he kept his views to himself for much of his career, agreed. It was a decision that would upend his life for the next two years.
Shortly after the launch of the official Scottish independence campaign for the referendum in 2014, he was appointed its chief executive.
Even in its early days, Jenkins was convinced that “this was going to be a campaign unlike anything Scotland’s ever seen before”.
It also became a job unlike anything Jenkins, no stranger to demanding jobs with punishing hours running large organisations, had ever taken on.
“It’s the most challenging thing I’ve done,” he says. “I lived the campaign every day for two years, and I loved the campaign every day for two years.”
Travelling in from his home in Glasgow’s south side to Yes Scotland’s office in Hope Street, he would start his days at around 8am for conference calls to liaise with the hotchpotch of groups and political figures that made up the organisation.
The job took him to every corner of Scotland. Wherever he went, Jenkins would be enlisted by local Yes groups to go on canvassing runs.
His wife, worried for his safety, talked him into getting a driver to ferry him around the country in case in case he succumbed to exhaustion on the road and ended up driving into a ditch.
“Usually I slept in the car and quite often both ways,” he says.
Perhaps given how much of himself he poured into the campaign, it’s unsurprising when Jenkins says he doesn’t think there was much the Yes campaign could have done differently.
The things he does think need to change, he’s keeping to himself until the next referendum – which he is confident will come at some point down the line.
“I don’t particularly see any reason why I would share any of that with the other side, so I would keep all that to myself,” he says.
Regardless of what might have been finessed with the benefit of hindsight, Jenkins can at least boast the Yes campaign achieved an extraordinary feat in changing public opinion against the might of the British state and a largely unfriendly media.
When the referendum was announced, Scottish independence was supported by around a third of people. Now it stands around half. But when Jenkins was steering Yes Scotland, he says he was never too concerned about what the polls said.
They never accounted for turnout reaching the levels it did, he says. “We knew how many people were registering to vote who had never voted before and we knew the people registering to vote were not registering to vote No.”
The defeat came as a blow to Jenkins. “I’m not going to deny, I was hugely disappointed,” he says.
“But I was just thinking of all the people I’d met over the past two years, the most fantastic people all around the country, how hard they’d been working. I’d met some quite elderly people who’d been campaigning for independence all their lives and they were now engaged in this referendum campaign they never really believed would happen.”
The 67-year-old says that while he thought he’d be around for the next referendum, he was depressed by the thought those veteran activists might not.
When that comes, Jenkins believes the Yes campaign would be in a much stronger place than in 2012, even than in 2014.
But he is not in the business of clairvoyance. “What we do know about Scottish politics and UK politics is that things change very quickly,” he says.
“It’s not hard to imagine circumstances in which independence comes right onto the front burner again for people in Scotland.
“The referendum changed Scotland forever in a very important way and that is that independence is now an option on the table that people in Scotland can pick up if they wish.”
And while Jenkins believes independence is “not people’s immediate priority” at the moment, it could well be if Keir Starmer fails to “create a vision for the UK going forward which a majority of people in Scotland wish to be part of”.
“The volume has been turned down on the independence debate but it hasn’t gone away,” he says.
“It’s still very much there in the background. I know after the General Election there were some politicians saying that result has killed off the independence issue.
“What you were hearing there was kind of wishful thinking. Independence has not gone away at all, it’s not people’s immediate priority but it could very easily become their main priority again and if and when it does, the Yes side starts from a much stronger position than in 2012.”
